Lawyers representing Dr Ranjeet Brar have filed a judicial review claim at the High Court against King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, challenging the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of anti-Semitism to suspend him in breach of his right to freedom of expression.
Dr Brar, who is also director of Right to Protest Limited, was suspended by the Trust on 6 April 2026 following a speech he delivered at a memorial for 168 children killed in a US Tomahawk cruise missile strike on the Minab primary school in Iran. His legal team contends that the IHRA definition was deployed to justify the suspension.
The claim is brought under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects freedom of expression, and Article 14, which prohibits discrimination. The discrimination ground centres on a significant disparity in how the government adopted the IHRA definition compared to the equivalent definition of anti-Muslim hostility.
The latter, developed through a separate and more consultative process, includes an express guarantee protecting the right to criticise Islam as a religion or Muslim culture and history. No equivalent safeguard — protecting the right to criticise Israel or Israeli government policy — was attached to the IHRA definition when the then prime minister Theresa May adopted it in 2016.
