A former United Nations judge and leading British lawyer who backed the international recognition of the Armenian Genocide in his recent landmark opinion is on the legal team defending the WikiLeaks founder.

International law expert Geoffrey Robertson, the author of the 2009 legal opinion piece: “Was There an Armenian Genocide?” has been in the center of the British media’s attention in recent days after promoting top whistleblower Julian Assange’s release on bail in a London court.

Robertson cut his Australia vacation short to return to London earlier this week to represent Assange, a 39-year-old Australian national facing sex charges in Sweden.

For many years, Robertson has been researching evidence related to the Armenian Genocide in Ottoman Turkey at the beginning of last century. At the request of the Armenian community in the UK, he published a legal opinion last year upholding the Armenian case that the massacres amounted to genocide, RFE/RL reported.