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Lord Slynn: noted for his vast reserves of energy and his gregarious, willing nature

Telegraph, 08 Apr 2009 – The Lord Slynn of Hadley, the former Law Lord who died on April 7 aged 79, had earlier been Britain’s advocate-general at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg from 1981 to 1988 and a judge of the court for four years after that.
A lawyer of uncommon intellectual ability, Slynn was renowned for his vast reserves of energy and his gregarious, willing nature – no cocktail party was trivial, no conference too dull – and these qualities combined to make a big impression at the ECJ. He was particularly influential in importing English common law principles of procedural fairness, and helped to establish the right to be heard of an individual or nation about which the court was taking a decision. Together with Lord Mackenzie Stuart, his predecessor as Britain’s judge, Slynn encouraged the court to indulge in oral argument. His published opinions on substantive law from his time as an advocate-general are still regularly cited in European law cases. Like all the Luxembourg judges, Slynn was a staunch pro-European, and would firmly remind the government, whenever a disagreeable European Community directive was questioned, that the supremacy of EC law over national law was ’as plain as a pikestaff’. The extent to which he was informed about the European debate as a whole rendered him a formidable opponent in his regular jousts with Margaret Thatcher and others on the Euro-sceptic wing of the Conservative party. Slynn was among those who supported calls for the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into English law, and remarked in 1989 that he had become ’appalled’ at the number of British cases going to the Commission and Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. A tall, slim, good-looking man with a mass of hair which tended to go a bit wild when not held in check by a wig, Slynn was probably more widely known internationally than any British judge since Lord Denning, and he had a prodigious memory for other people’s faces and names. Gordon Slynn was born on February 17 1930 and educated at Sandbach School, Cheshire, Goldsmith’s College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where as a senior scholar he took an MA and LLM and became president of the university law society. Called to the Bar by Gray’s Inn in 1956, Slynn became Roger Parker ’s pupil in HAP Fisher ’s chambers at 1 Hare Court, was duly taken on and began practising in heavy commercial work. His exceptional ability was soon noticed. In 1967 he was appointed junior counsel to the Ministry of Labour, and made an impressive showing in difficult employment tax cases in the Divisional Court. His unaggressive assertiveness and sense of humour went down well with judges, and on several occasions he turned the court in cases which had been running strongly against him. In 1968 he was appointed as the ’Treasury devil’, instructed by the Treasury solicitor in cases on behalf of all government departments in the Divisional Court before the Lord Chief Justice. The job entailed an immense amount of work, requiring all Slynn’s speed and energy. In cases concerning the judicial review of ministerial decisions, Slynn had an astonishing success rate of around 85 per cent, and contributed greatly to the development of the law in that area, then in its infancy. He appeared in a series of landmark cases, among them the Crossman Diaries and the Sunday Times and Thalidomide cases. Slynn also represented the government at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and at the European Human Rights Commission in Strasbourg. Not long after the Immigration Act of 1971 came in, he appeared in the highly political East African Asians case in Strasbourg, about the rights to residency of British citizens of Asian descent – one of the few that went against him. Because he was still so young, Slynn was reluctant to go on to the bench without first taking Silk, which – exceptionally for a Treasury devil – he did, in 1974. He spent the next two years as the first-ever leading Treasury counsel. Having served as Recorder of Hereford for five years from 1971, he was appointed a Judge of the High Court, Queen’s Bench Division, in 1976. Almost immediately he was chosen to sit in the Court of Criminal Appeal, and he was one of three judges who freed three men from prison after hearing that the long-winded and ’unintelligible’ trial judge had ’bored the jury to sleep’. In 1977 he was one of three appeal judges who caused a furore by freeing a Coldstream Guardsman who had violently and indecently assaulted a 17-year-old barmaid, substituting a suspended prison sentence in order to save the man’s ’promising career’. Three Labour MPs tabled a motion calling for the dismissal of the three judges, and 15 members of the organisation Women Against Rape invaded the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall where, according to the record books, Slynn was a member. Slynn had in fact resigned from the club a few months previously. Nevertheless, the women’s demonstration (which consisted of draping a banner over the bronze statue of Athena and haranguing the 50 or so diners – one of whom applauded, and another of whom unwisely sought to defend the judges’ decision) greatly distressed Slynn, who despite his convivial exterior was a private and sensitive man, given to occasional bouts of worry and self-doubt. One cannot be sure whether Slynn had agreed with the decision to vary the sentence, since the Court of Criminal Appeal gives only one judgment. Almost certainly, though, as the most junior of the three appeal judges, his input would have been less than the other two, in particular than that of the forceful Eustace Roskill. The following year Slynn was appointed president of the Employment Appeal Tribunal, with which he spent the next three years, before succeeding Jean-Pierre Warner as Britain’s advocate-general in Luxembourg in 1981 – chosen for his experience of European Law gained as Treasury counsel and for his ability to speak French (his wife is from France). In 1992 he made it known to the Lord Chancellor, Lord Mackay, that he would like to return to the English judiciary, and that year he was elevated to the House of Lords, where he quickly stamped his independence of mind on the judicial committee, being one of two who dissented in the 1993 case involving five homosexual sadomasochists who had agreed to be tortured in each others’ homes. Slynn pointed out that the accused were old enough to know what they were doing, none of them had suffered serious injury, and he saw no reason to send them to already crowded prisons. He was part of a seven-man judicial committee of the Privy Council which, in 1995, commuted to life imprisonment the sentences of two prisoners who had been on Death Row in Jamaica for 14 years. The ruling led to a series of similar reprieves, on the ground that to delay capital punishment for so long was inhuman and degrading. In 1998 he dissented from the majority House of Lords decision to allow the former Chilean leader General Pinochet’s extradition to Spain over alleged crimes of torture, genocide and kidnapping. Slynn felt that as a former head of state, the general – who had come to Britain for a back operation – was entitled to claim immunity from arrest and extradition proceedings here in respect of official acts committed while he was in office. Slynn did not accept that all recognised ’international’ crimes fell outside the scope of this protection, and the fact that an act was recognised as a crime under international law did not mean that the courts of all states had jurisdiction to try it. Slynn became a Bencher in 1970 and Treasurer of Gray’s Inn in 1988. He was knighted in 1976 and created a life peer in 1992. He was appointed GBE in 2009. He sat on countless committees. As president of the Academy of Experts, he attacked solicitors for seeking to undermine the independence of expert witnesses, describing as ’objectionable’ attempts to offer witnesses bonuses or a cut of the damages if their client won. He also led the legal campaign for the Iranian Resistance which eventually led to the removal of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) from the British and EU’s blacklists. Slynn always took great pains to encourage young barristers making their way, and to persuade suitable young protégés to take up legal careers. Among Slynn’s 16 pupils was Nicholas Lyell, later Attorney General. The array of universities at which Slynn lectured included Cambridge, Oxford, the LSE, Durham, Cornell, King’s College London, the University of Technology in Sydney, the National University of India in Bangalore, and the University of British Columbia. He collected six honorary fellowships from universities around the world, and some 15 honorary doctorates. Slynn was chairman of the International Law Association from 1988 and honorary vice-president of the Union Internationale des Avocats from 1973. He was a fellow of the International Society of Barristers in the United States, a member of the American Law Institute and an honorary member of the Canadian Bar Association. He was a connoisseur of wine, and kept a large cellar at his William and Mary house at Eggington, in Bedfordshire. He was fond of the visual arts, dance and music – he was a governor of Sadler’s Wells – and very attached to his dogs. Lord Slynn married, in 1962, Odile Marie Henriette Boutin. They met when she was working as a nurse at a hospital in which he was being treated following a car crash. There were no children.

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