At the Tribunal | |
Before
HIS HONOUR JUDGE D M LEVY QC
MR J R CROSBY
MRS E HART
APPELLANT | |
RESPONDENT |
Transcript of Proceedings
JUDGMENT
PRELIMINARY HEARING
For the Appellant | IN PERSON |
JUDGE D M LEVY QC: Mr Habib Hussain wishes to appeal against a decision of an Industrial Tribunal which was held at Sheffield on Tuesday, 21 May 1996. Its decision was sent to the parties on 14 June 1996; its unanimous decision was that Mr Hussain suffered no racial discrimination on the grounds of race and they dismissed his complaint.
The reason Mr Hussain wishes to challenge the decision of the Industrial Tribunal is, he says, that they were quite simply wrong. He asserts that he did suffer racial discrimination. We have looked carefully into the decision of the Industrial and the Extended Reasons which were given.
The short facts are that Mr Hussain was employed by the Respondents t/a Mercury Cars as a taxi driver. A number of complaints were made against him and, without going into findings of rights and wrongs of the complaints, the Company dispensed with his services in a manner which the Industrial Tribunal found to be procedurally quite improper, but having heard the evidence about racial discrimination they were satisfied on the balance of probabilities that Mr Hussain had not been differently treated than would have been a white driver if the same sort of complaints had been made about him. That does not mean to say that anyone believed the complaints, but the body of complaints were such that Mr Hussain could no longer be retained and the Industrial Tribunal found that the employers were reasonable in taking the decision they did to dismiss him, ie a hypothetical reasonable employer could have taken the same decision.
Among the matters which troubled Mr Hussain was that many complaints had been made about another employee and he was not dismissed. That was dealt with by the Industrial Tribunal to whom the employers had given an explanation. They said that of the complaints about that employee they were not dismissible complaints. That was a matter which the Tribunal also accepted. Mr Hussain complained that his case got reported in the press. That is a hazard of litigation but is not a ground for us to interfere with the decision.
This Tribunal can only interfere with the decision of an Industrial Tribunal if it contains an error of law or if, on the evidence before it, it reached a decision which no reasonable Tribunal would have arrived at, or if there were no facts found which support the decision it made. On all that we seen and heard, we cannot fault the decision of the Industrial Tribunal in any way.
In those circumstances, we dismiss the appeal of Mr Hussain at this stage. We would like to thank Mr Hussain for the calm and careful manner in which he has made his submissions to us.