Obituary of Amédée Turner Q.C.
Amédée Turner Q.C., has died at the age of 92. For many years an active member of chambers at 1 Essex Court and latterly a Door Tenant at the merged set of Hogarth Chambers.
He was called to the bar in 1954, and for a time thereafter worked as an associate of Kenyon & Kenyon, patent attorneys, in New York City, advising American clients on English patent law. In 1960 he returned to chambers in London, and in 1962 published The Law of Trade Secrets. He took silk in 1976, but his busy practice at the bar was largely suspended when he was elected as a Conservative member of the European Parliament for Suffolk in 1979, a seat he held for fifteen years. He had, however, prepared another authoritative legal work, The Law of the New European Patent which was published in 1980.
As an MEP, Amédée was active in the harmonisation of pan-European intellectual property law, in particular as the rapporteur of Trade Mark, Regulation and Directive and the spokesman on the European Parliament Research and Technology Committee: European policy on Industrial Research and Development.
From 2002 to 2006, he was a member of the Advisory Council to the Anglican Observer mission to the United Nations, which led him to organise a large number of discussion meetings with representative Muslims in the US and Britain to assess their attitudes to democracy and human rights. The findings were finally published in 2019 in Islam and Democracy: Voices of Muslims amongst us. A useful companion volume, published in 2017, is his All the Qur’an in 100 Pages by a Non-Muslim for Non-Muslims.
His most lasting legacy is the unique garden which, over the course of 74 years, he created in the village of Westleton in Suffolk and which reflects his creativity, vivid imagination, broad interests and eccentric personality.
Amédée died peacefully at his home in Westleton, Suffolk, on 13th September, after a short illness. He is survived by Debby, his wife for more than sixty years, and their children Pippa and Andrew.
