20.07.07
OBITUARY
Sydney Golder
Born 28 August 1923 - Died 22 March 2007.
Syd Golder was one of the fathers of prison law. Following the 1969 Parkhurst riot he was outraged, as many prisoners are today, by finding untrue entries on his wing file. In this case the entry said he had assaulted a prison officer, something that he was not charged with or accused of in any public forum, and which he was adamant had not occurred. At this point prisoners only had access to lawyers in connection with their criminal cases. Syd wanted to take a libel action against the person who had written in his file and to consult a solicitor about doing this. Using law books he had been provided with by his criminal appeal solicitor, he wrote an application to the European Court of Human Rights setting out the articles of the convention he believed to have been violated. By the time the Court found in his favour he had been released from prison. He never went back again, spending the rest of his life working in London theatre, and therefore never personally gained from the case, which became a cornerstone in the legal establishment of prisoners’ rights (Golder v United Kingdom (1979-80) 1 EHRR 524.) PAS was proud to have Syd as one of the guests at our tenth anniversary birthday celebration in 2001.
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