The employment tribunal was right to strike out a Crown court judge’s claims concerning the handling of grievances she lodged against senior judges and court staff, an appeal has ruled.
The legal team for Her Honour Judge Kalyani Kaul KC asked the Employment Appeal Tribunal to set aside an employment tribunal judgment of May 2021 which struck out elements of the claim Kaul brought against the Ministry of Justice, lord chancellor and lord chief justice. Mr Justice Swift was also asked at a one-day hearing last month to order that summary determination of Kaul’s claims was not appropriate.
In a judgment published yesterday, Swift said the tribunal judge was entitled to reach the conclusions he had.
Kaul's two grievances, raised in 2019, arose from events that began in 2015, shortly after she was appointed a circuit judge.
'I do not for the purposes of this judgment need to set out the details of the complaints,' Swift said. 'However, put generally, the claimant considered the judges had failed properly to support her both during and after a trial that had commenced in November 2015 and then been restarted in January 2016; that one of the judges acted so as to victimise her by reason of previous complaints she had made against court staff; and that actions by court staff had in various way amounted to bullying, harassment and victimisation.'
Kaul brought claims under section 50 of the Equality Act, which applies to persons holding public office. The claims were resisted by the MoJ, lord chancellor and lord chief justice, who partially succeeded in asking the employment tribunal to strike them out. Kaul argued that the ET judge’s conclusions that the complaints struck out had no reasonable prospect of success were not conclusions properly open to him.
Dismissing Kaul's appeal, Swift said Kaul's legal team was right to emphasise that decisions that a claim has no reasonable prospect of success on its facts should be rare, but that the claims struck out rested on undisputed events 'which at face value, were all entirely ordinary matters'.
Swift added: 'The claimant’s grounds of complaint simply asserted – in terms that can only be described as formulaic – that each event gave rise to a series (in some instances, the same series) of causes of action under the 2010 act. The grounds of complaint provided little if anything at all to explain why the events relied on ought not be accepted at face value. Were they to be accepted at face value the claims based on those events would [inevitably] fail.
'In these circumstances, the judge’s factual conclusions were permissible. The submission that in this case the judge’s conclusions were premature and matters ought to have been leftover to a final hearing rests on no matter of true substance.’
