High Court dismisses tweeting solicitor’s appeal over antisemitic posts

A solicitor has failed to overturn his strike off at the High Court over antisemitic posts on social media.

Farrukh Najeeb Husain, admitted in 2014, was struck off in February 2024 over tweets he had made on the social media site then known as Twitter. Husain accepted he was the author of the tweets but said he should not be disciplined as he posted them in a personal capacity. A judgment was handed down the following month. Husain appealed against the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal’s findings and sanction.

In Farrukh Najeeb Husain v Solicitors Regulation Authority, Mr Justice Chamberlain said the ‘central issue in the proceedings…is whether [Husain] overstepped the boundaries of legitimate political speech and, in particular, whether when criticising Israel he used language that was antisemitic’.

The issues involved in this case 'understandably evoke strong reactions on both sides', the judge said. 'They are likely to arise in other cases. Where they do, legal representatives would be well-advised to focus rigorously on the issues the court has to determine, confine their submissions to those issues and aim to lower, rather than raise, the temperature of debate in written and oral arguments.’

The judgment noted the SDT's judgment was ‘detailed and comprehensive’ and the SDT ‘did not misdirect itself as to the high bar required before concluding that Mr Husain had breached principles 2, 5 and 6 of the SRA principles’. It added that the tribunal was ‘entitled and…clearly correct’ to regard particular posts as ‘instances of antisemitism’.

The judge noted that parts of the SDT judgment ‘could be seen as reflecting a view that speech which denies the Jewish people their right to self-determination and/or claims that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour is ipso facto antisemitic’.

He said: ‘If and to the extent that the tribunal took that view, they were in my view wrong to do so for the reasons I have given. But any such error was not material, because the many examples I have given above amply justify the tribunal’s ultimate conclusion…that: “the accretion of the respondent’s tweets over a spread of months; their frequency, sustained intensity, and the cumulative impact of the language used by the respondent made it more likely than not that when viewed collectively the tweets were founded on hatred or hostility towards Jews”.

‘Indeed, the tribunal could not rationally have reached any other conclusion than that Mr Husain had, over a long period, repeatedly tweeted in terms that were both grossly offensive and antisemitic.’

The judge said the tribunal’s conclusions in relation to the principles breached were ‘plainly open to it and, in my view, correct’. Referring to sanction, he said there was no error of law or principle or approach in the SDT’s consideration of sanction.

‘In my judgment, the tribunal explained adequately why it had concluded that no lesser sanction than striking off would suffice. I cannot say that this conclusion was wrong in the sense of being “clearly inappropriate” or “outside the bounds of what the tribunal could properly and reasonably decide”.’

The appeal was dismissed on all grounds.