A barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, she has acted in key international law, human rights and media freedom cases in domestic and international courts.
Jen grew up in Berry, a small rural town on the NSW South Coast, where she attended public schools. She went on to study at the Australian National University, working three jobs alongside her studies, before attending the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
At just 21, she spent a year in West Papua as part of her studies. Since then, she has continued to defend political prisoners and fight for human rights, advocating for the United Liberation Movement and its leader Benny Wenda, and co-founding International Lawyers for West Papua.
She has fearlessly defended free speech and human rights in some of the most significant and high-profile legal cases worldwide. She has fought the persecution and secured the freedom of arbitrarily detained journalists, protesters, human rights defenders, and Australian citizens. She has represented Julian Assange and WikiLeaks since 2010, working to secure his release in 2024.
She has worked as an advisor to UN investigations and has conducted international human rights missions for the International Bar Association. She secured the release of Australian Hazem Hamouda, who was imprisoned in Egypt for over a year without charge. She has acted for the BBC World Service, the bereaved family of assassinated Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, and the International Federation of Journalists and bereaved family members of Palestinian journalists, including Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by Israeli forces.
A consistent advocate for women’s rights and combatting gender-based violence, Jen has fought the silencing and disadvantaging of women by the legal system. She examined this topic in her co-authored book How Many More Women?, driven by the reaction to her successful defence of Amber Heard in the 2020 defamation case taken by Johnny Depp against The Sun.
Jen co-authored ‘How Many More Women’ (published as ‘Silenced Women’ in the UK) with her colleague, Dr Keio Yoshida. SILENCED, the film based on her book, had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival in 2026. This follows another film about Jen’s work on the Assange case that came out in 2025, called The Six Billion Dollar Man.
Jen has played a leading role in climate justice litigation. Representing Vanuatu and the Marshall Islands, she achieved a landmark resolution to take climate change to the International Court of Justice to clarify states’ obligations and hold countries accountable for climate harm under international law.
She founded the Bertha Justice Initiative, which supported the careers of nearly 500 young human rights lawyers and funded their training in full, and sits on the board of the Grata Fund. She is currently a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, which specialises in civil liberties and human rights.
Jen’s remarkable human rights achievements demonstrate the power international law, and her commitment to justice, which has at times put her at significant personal risk, exemplifies the values at the heart of the Sydney Peace Prize. She emboldens us to believe that a more peaceful and just world is possible.
She received the 2026 Sydney Peace Prize “for her commitment to international law and her dedication to upholding and promoting human rights including free speech, press freedom, and gender and climate justice.“
She’s highly sought after in the corporate world, especially in her native Australia (she’s recently spoken to The UN, SXSW, National Press Club of Australia – to name just a few), and talks wonderfully well about a range of subjects / topics influenced by her incredible work. She can include stories and insights from the world-renowned cases she’s lead on and always finishes with time for an audience Q&A.
Keynotes
Women’s Rights / Empowering Women to Speak Out
Freedom of Expression / Press Freedom (link to her SXSW keynote – re Julian Assange)
Climate Justice
Taking On Big Powers and Winning
State Education (she was state school educated and is an active campaigner for better funding for state schools and equity in education)