Lucy Geddes

Lucy Geddes is a human rights lawyer who leads the Asylum Seekers’ Rights project at the Public Interest Advocacy Centre (PIAC). This independent, non-profit organisation works with marginalised and disadvantaged communities. She is also a teaching fellow at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Previously she worked at Victoria Legal Aid, where she was part of the team who filed the case challenging the use of compulsory electroconvulsive shock treatment and won. Lucy has also worked at the International Criminal Court in the Hague and served as the head of Legal Action Worldwide’s Sri Lanka office.

Lucy trained in a unique DTP online training program on human rights leadership to influence policy for Indonesian rights advocates. The program was developed with the Australian Human Rights Institute and the UNSW Institute for Global Development. It took place over six months. In that program, Lucy led a session and mentored a group of Indonesian human rights advocates who were designing an advocacy campaign on a complex issue.

“It was fantastic. Participants were very engaged; their ideas were so creative, and they were responsive to feedback – I was very impressed. DTP is providing people with toolkits to address human rights issues within their own countries to encourage long-term strategies and processes to address human rights violations. However, as part of that capacity-building process, it creates an opportunity to exchange ideas and perspectives between participants and trainers. This means it’s not just a one-way process – I learned so much from the participants and many of their ideas I can use within my own work.”

When asked why Lucy was interested in human rights advocacy, she said growing up in a small NSW town called Griffith played a significant role in developing her interest to work in human rights.

“I remember when I was year 10, in the geography class in school, a new student arrived, and she sat next to me. We talked and I learned she came to Australia from Afghanistan and had just been released from immigration detention. Her family had been granted temporary protection visas and ended up in Griffith. So those were the types of conversations I was having with other students in high school. And it was clear to me from an early age, that the treatment of many different groups of people in our society is discriminatory.”

When Lucy met Professor Justine Nolan, a DTP board member at Columbia University in 2012 in her final year of law school, it was a turning point in her life. Justine was convening a course on International human rights law at Columbia University.

“That was the first time I met anyone who called themselves a human rights lawyer. I had this dream that I wanted to be a human rights lawyer, but I never met anyone who called themselves a human rights lawyer, and I had no idea that human rights law could be a viable and possible career path.”

Lucy is passionate about ensuring that our society is just and inclusive: where all human beings are treated with dignity. As the refugee crisis is worsening globally, Lucy believes the impact of programs like DTP will help to address these issues by creating opportunities to exchange knowledge and perspectives across the region.