A second appeal concerning the GPhC fitness to practise committee’s findings on a case involving antisemitic remarks at a 2017 rally has been thrown out by the High Court. 

Last week, judge Martin Chamberlain dismissed an appeal brought by the Professional Standards Authority, a body that oversees the UK’s healthcare profession regulators, concerning remarks made by London pharmacist Nazim Ali while addressing a pro-Palestine rally in September 2017.

The PSA had previously succeeded in overturning the FtP committee’s initial decision in 2020 that Mr Ali’s remarks – which included allegations that “Zionist supporters of the Tory party” were “responsible for the murder of the people in Grenfell” – were offensive but not antisemitic. 

Redetermining Mr Ali’s case last September, the FtP committee found that two out of four of Mr Ali’s remarks, including the above example about the Grenfell Tower fire, were indeed antisemitic. Mr Ali was issued a warning.

In its latest appeal, the PSA urged the High Court to take the view that a warning was “an insufficient sanction” to safeguard public confidence in the pharmacist profession and argued that the FtP committee “gave undue weight” to Mr Ali’s expression of remorse for the incident.

“In this case, the terms of the warning were particularly anodyne and did not adequately reflect the gravity of the conduct found proved,” argued Fenella Morris KC for the PSA according to Justice Chamberlain’s summary of the hearing. 

The barrister advanced two other grounds of appeal, namely that the FtP committee “wrongly dismissed the option of imposing conditions” on Mr Ali such as requiring him to attend antisemitism awareness training and that it had given “inadequate reasons” for its choice of sanction.  

Justice Chamberlain dismissed all three grounds of appeal, explaining that in his view the FtP committee was entitled to decide that a warning was an adequate sanction and saying: “If I had been the decision maker, I would have taken the same view.” He also ruled that the FtP had committee had “approached their task in a methodical and logical way” and “made findings of fact for which they gave comprehensible reasons”.

However, he acknowledged that there was “force” in Morris’s argument that the committee had placed undue weight on its finding that Mr Ali’s unscripted remarks were not intended to be antisemitic. 

The comments on the Grenfell fire “fell into the obviously racist category,” the judge said, noting that they drew on common antisemitic tropes. 

The PSA has been approached for comment.