A judge has with a ‘heavy heart’ allowed the Crown Prosecution Service to continue defending an employment tribunal claim that has already been in court four times and cost the taxpayer more than £1m, including a record £600,000 in damages for racial discrimination.

Former CPS prosecutor Halima Aziz was suspended from her job in October 2001 after she allegedly made provocative remarks about terrorist Osama Bin Laden to staff at Bradford Magistrates’ Court.

In 2004, Leeds employment tribunal found that, in suspending Aziz, the CPS had racially discriminated against her. The CPS appealed to the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) and won, and Aziz then appealed to the Court of Appeal, which upheld her claim and returned the case to the employment tribunal for a remedies hearing in September 2008. She was awarded £600,000 in damages, including £10,000 aggravated damages arising from what the judge, in a highly critical summing up, described as the ‘flawed’ disciplinary practices of the CPS.

The CPS accepted the finding of racial discrimination, but disputed the damages, and at a preliminary hearing last month the EAT gave permission for an appeal, that will be heard in six months. Judge Peter Clark said he had granted leave to appeal ‘with heavy heart’, and gave a costs warning to the CPS.

Aziz’s solicitor Mark Emery, employment partner at London firm Bindmans, said the CPS had so far instructed two QCs, a junior barrister and a law firm partner to continue a case that it first lost in 2004.

He said: ‘It has already cost the taxpayer a fortune and still the case goes on. The CPS brought a vast quantity of material to the recent EAT hearing that it had just two hours to explain. The judge was forced to concede that he could not strike out the case – because he simply did not know enough [because of the amount of material] to say with certainty that it was unarguable.’

A CPS spokeswoman said the prosecutor accepted the tribunal’s finding that there had been less favourable treatment of Aziz on grounds of race, which the judge found was not intentional or conscious, but the CPS disputed some of the judge’s criticisms.

She said it was ‘the duty of a public body to take independent legal advice when faced with litigation’ and to assess the advice and act accordingly. She said the CPS had acted ‘responsibly and reasonably’ at all times.