Court sheds light on relevance of European Convention on Human Rights to conduct of SFA disciplinary proceedings.

Joanna Gray, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne

On 26 April Mr Justice Morison sitting in the Administrative Court handed down judgment in R (on the application of Fleurose) v Securities and Futures Authority Ltd and another. This case concerned an application for a judicial review by Mr Bertrand Fleurose, formerly a Senior Cash Arbitrage Trader at JP Morgan Securities Ltd of SFA’s conduct of disciplinary proceedings against him in 1999. Insofar as the principal ground of the application concerned the integrity of aspects of SFA disciplinary procedures under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for the right to a fair trial, then the reasoning employed by the Court in its dismissal of this application is instructive given the concerns that still remain in some quarters on the fairness degree of Human Rights law compliance of FSA discipline and enforcement after N2. Despite the fact that this decision obviously relates strictly to the current position of disciplinary structures set up by SFA under the Financial Services Act 1986 the Court made one or two points of interest that will be as relevant after N2 as they are now.