George Newhouse

George Newhouse is an Australian human rights lawyer and a former local councillor.

He is the principal solicitor of the National Justice Project, a human rights and social justice legal service, and currently an Adjunct Professor of Law at Macquarie University.

and at the University of Technology Sydney.

In 1990 he returned to Sydney and continued working as a lawyer with Swaab & Associates.

He became an accredited mediator and was a member of the Consumer Trader Tenancy Tribunal from 1999 to 2007 and a mediator for the Workers Compensation Commission from 2001 to 2010.

In addition to his expertise in social justice law, Newhouse specialises in defamation, privacy, negligence, property, finance and planning law.

He is an adjunct professor at Macquarie University

where he teaches law, he is also an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney at the Jumbunna Inst for Indigenous Education & Research and is also the chapter editor of Thomson Reuters The Laws of Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – Civil Justice Issues.

He was the Mayor of Waverley in the eastern suburbs of Sydney from 2006 to 2007, and the Labor candidate for the seat of Wentworth at the 2007 Australian federal election.

Newhouse attended Sydney Grammar School and then studied Law and Commerce at the University of New South Wales.

After leaving university, Newhouse joined JPMorgan in Sydney as a corporate finance executive and was later transferred to JPMorgan's New York office.

From New York he moved to London where he worked for two years as a capital markets lawyer for Clifford Chance.

In 2006 Newhouse worked with the Mutitjulu Aboriginal Community to overturn the decision of the Howard Government to impose an Administrator over the Mutitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation on the basis that the decision was ultra vires, or beyond the power of the decision maker.

In August 2008 Newhouse was invited to participate in the prime minister, Kevin Rudd's Australia 2020 summit in the area of indigenous affairs.

Newhouse is well known in Australia for his human rights work with refugees, former Immigration detainees and Aboriginal Australians.

In January 2009 Newhouse advised Barbara Shaw and the Prescribed Areas Peoples Alliance on their complaint about the Commonwealth Government's Northern Territory Intervention Laws to the United Nations Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

In August 2009 Newhouse, on behalf of Barbara Shaw and other town camp residents, gathered a team of lawyers led by Ron Merkel to stop the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Jenny Macklin from proceeding with her takeover of the Alice Springs Town Camps and entering into a 40-year lease with the town camp associations.

In June 2010 Newhouse represented Tamil asylum seekers in their complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission regarding the suspension of the processing of their visas; which have subsequently been processed.

In February 2011 Newhouse was successful in securing the release of Seena Akhlaqi Sheikhdost, an orphan whose parents had died in a shipwreck on Christmas Island from immigration detention.

He also facilitated a family with two vulnerable children to be moved from Inverbrackie Detention Centre in Adelaide to community detention in Sydney.

Newhouse has championed the use of the Commonwealth's common law duty of care to have children released from fenced detention.

In 2011 in the WA Coroner's Court, Newhouse represented the survivors and relatives of those who died in the 2010 Christmas Island boat disaster; and he represented the next of kin of one of the three suicides in Villawood before the NSW Coroner.

He also obtained an injunction to stop the first Afghan asylum seeker to be forcibly returned to Afghanistan.

In 2013 he acted for two vulnerable youths in immigration detention and had them released into the community.

In 2013 and 2014 together with Julian Burnside and Dan Mori he mounted a Constitutional Challenge to the detention of asylum seekers on Nauru.

Newhouse fought for the rights of those indefinitely detained in immigration detention to be released or to have their adverse ASIO determinations reviewed.

Newhouse led a team of lawyers to challenge the Minister of Immigration's decision to refuse to bring a woman who had become pregnant as a result of a rape on Nauru to Australia for a safe and lawful termination.

His success in the Plaintiff s99 Case affirmed that the Minister for Immigration had a duty of care to asylum seekers offshore as well as in Australia.

Newhouse co-founded the National Justice Project in 2016 with Dan Mori and Duncan Fine.

As the principal solicitor of the Project his work involves using the law in ways that support and advance social justice and human rights in Australia.

It does this by supporting those who are least able to access justice and whose cases can advance human rights within Australia and the Pacific region.

In addition the National Justice Project has taken on a number of research, education, advocacy and reform projects such as the Aboriginal Health Project.

His extensive social justice work was acknowledged in 2017 when he was awarded the Ron Castan Humanitarian award and again in 2019 when he received the Australian Lawyers Alliance Civil Justice Award

Newhouse represented Vivian Solon, who was deported from Australia to the Philippines; Cornelia Rau, who was detained in an Australian detention centre for ten months; the Sudanese Dafurian community, and the family of the late Richard Niyonsaba.

Newhouse has also acted for Tamil, Chinese, Palestinian and Iranian asylum seekers following the Rau and Solon cases.

As a result of that action Newhouse was able to bring other women to Australia throughout 2017.

In February 2017 the National Justice Project, under the direction of Newhouse, was successful, in obtaining an injunction to stop the Minister for Immigration from implementing a blanket policy to remove the mobile phones of all detainees in Immigration Detention.

In December 2017 Newhouse and the National Justice Project team commenced legal proceedings for a 12-year-old girl (known by the pseudonym FRX17) on Nauru who required urgent medical treatment which was not available on Nauru that case was successful and they followed up that case with legal action for 46 other refugee children on Nauru.

Those cases and the Nauru Government's decision to deport Medecins Sans Frontieres medical staff led to the #kidsoffnauru campaign and ultimately to legislation, known as the "Medevac bill" to ensure the medical evacuation of refugees in need of care.

His work in this area has been documented in an academic article published in the Court of Conscience.