Sir Henry Egar Garfield Hodge died he was 65

Sir Henry Egar Garfield Hodge, died he was 65. Sir Henry The Hon. Mr Justice Hodge, was an English solicitor and judge of the High Court of England and Wales.

(12 January 1944 - 18 June 2009)

Hodge was educated at Chigwell School and read law at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1965. He qualified as a solicitor in 1970. From 1977, he practised as a solicitor in north London with the firm, Hodge Jones & Allen, that he founded with partners Peter Jones and Patrick Allen. He became a recorder in 1993, and a circuit judge in October 1999, when he retired from his firm. He was appointed Chief Immigration Adjudicator in 2001.

On 1 October 2004, he became the third solicitor to sit as an High Court judge in England and Wales, after Sir Michael Sachs (appointed in 1993) and Sir Lawrence Collins (appointed in 2000). In April 2005, he became president of the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal.

He served as Deputy Chairman of the Legal Aid Board from 1996 to 1999. He was chairman of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and deputy director of the Child Poverty Action Group. He received an OBE for services to the Social Security Advisory Committee. He was also a Vice-President of the Law Society.

In October 2007 Hodge caused great controversy when he blocked a decision from the Home Office to deport an immigrant from Sierra Leone after the man carried out a number of sexual attacks on women in London parks. Hodge's reason for not seeking to deport him was that the criminal in question had no family left in the Sierra Leone, the country he left to come to Britain when aged six.

He married Labour politician Margaret Hodge in 1978. In addition to a son and daughter from her first marriage, they have two daughters together. He died of leukaemia on 18 June 2009.