A solicitor struck off after he failed to tell the regulator of an harassment conviction in Norway has urged Court of Appeal judges to ‘have mercy’ on him.

Farid El Diwany was appearing in an application to re-amend his appeal grounds, in a long-standing fight against the Solicitors Regulation Authority to reinstate him to the roll. El Diwany appeared in the High Court at the end of 2022 where Justice Murray granted the SRA’s application for a civil restraint order.

Speaking as a litigant in person, El Diwany said: ‘Can you not see the hell I have been through? [I ask that you] have mercy and I not be struck off. This will follow me to my grave and continue for hundreds of years later. If I was not Muslim this would not have happened. You have got to have mercy on me.’

He said his strike-off was a ‘permanent blemish’ on his name and told judges his convictions were ‘unsafe’. 

El Diwany added: ‘You have got to listen up and have a degree of mercy on someone that has done nothing wrong. Yes, I have said strong words but nothing the Daily Mail and Sun do not do every day.’

Master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos, sitting with lady justice Macur and lady justice Falk, said: ‘We are not and cannot unpick 28 years of history. We might feel very sympathetic but that does not necessarily impact the legal decision because sympathy is not the legal question.’

Benjamin Tankel, appearing for the SRA, said there was ‘nothing new’ in El Diwany’s application. The regulator dealt with its submissions in writing.

In court filings, the SRA said: ‘The additional grounds upon which the appellant relies in his amended application notice do not amount to “exceptional circumstances” for CPR 52.30 purposes…they are simply disagreements with the merits of Warby LJ’s decision.’

It added that there was no apparent bias and ‘whether or not a solicitor’s conduct had adequate justification is quintessentially a matter for the SDT as a specialist tribunal’.

In a judgment handed down remotely on 26 July in Farid El Diwany v Solicitors Regulation Authority, Sir Geoffrey Vos, Lady Justice Macur and Lady Justice Falk dismissed the applications, certifying them as totally without merit. They imposed a general civil restraint order for the maximum three years.