London – Mayor Wins Appeal in Case Sparked by His Anti-Semitic Comments

London – London Mayor Ken Livingstone won an appeal against a disciplinary panel ruling that said he had brought his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi camp guard. 

High Court Justice Andrew Collins, who had already quashed a four-week suspension from office the panel imposed on Livingstone, said the remark was offensive but that the mayor had the right to express his views “as forcibly as he thought fit.”  “Surprising as it may perhaps appear to some, the right of freedom of speech does extend to abuse,” Collins said in overturning the Adjudication Panel for England’s finding. 
The panel ruled in February that the two-term mayor was guilty of making remarks that were “unnecessarily insensitive and offensive” and ordered him suspended from his job for four weeks.

Justice Collins also said that Livingstone should have apologized for the hurt he had caused and could probably have avoided disciplinary action had he done so.  However, Collins said that since Livingstone had been off duty when he made the remarks, the panel was wrong to rule that they had reflected on his office.

Livingstone said after the verdict that he was not anti-Semitic and would have apologized if the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which filed a complaint about his comment, had asked him to.