Judgment Approved by the court for handing down. [2025] EWHC 1170 (Admin) AC-2024-LON-001310 HUSAIN v SRA 76. In similar vein, the European Court of Human Rights has emphasised that the right to freedom of expression is applicable “not only to ‘information’ or ‘ideas’ that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also those that offend, shock or disturb”: see e.g. Nilsen v Norway (2000) 30 EHRR 878 [GC], [43], using a formulation which first appeared in Handyside v UK (1979-80) 1 EHRR 737, [49]. 77. However, as the Court of Appeal recently recognised in Adil, at [68], there are decided cases which recognise the lawful interference with Article 10 rights in the interests of the proper regulation of the professions. One of these was Diggins. 78. In that case, Warby J heard an appeal from a decision of the of the Disciplinary Tribunal of the Council of the Inns of Court which had imposed a reprimand and a fine for sending a single tweet using crude racist and sexist language, directed at a young, black student. At [82] of his judgment, he dismissed an argument based on Lord Kerr’s judgment in Stocker, that a person should not be criticised for tweeting causally, without thought or inhibition. He said: “As everybody knows, some of the most damaging and hurtful statements are those made casually, without proper forethought or self-restraint.” At [83], he added: “It is a notorious fact that many on Twitter use rude and offensive language, indeed that some engage in harassment of others, or wounding ‘pile-ons’. But I have no evidence, nor is it a matter of common knowledge, that everybody on Twitter behaves in these ways. Even if that was so, a descriptive norm of that kind could not confer a right on any individual user to post rude or offensive messages.” At [96], he found that the panel was right to strike the balance between the appellant’s free speech and privacy rights, and the rights of others, in the way they did. 79. In Holbrook v BSB (Case 2021/4441, 25 March 2022), a panel of the Bar Tribunal and Adjudication Service allowed an appeal against the decision of an Independent Decision-making Panel to impose an administrative sanction on a barrister in respect of a single tweet, responding to a tweet calling for the French satirical magazine Chalie Hebdo to be shut down. The barrister had tweeted: “Free speech is dying & Islamists and other Muslims are playing a central role. Who will lead the struggle to reinstate free speech as the foundation of all other freedoms?” 80. The panel (chaired by Lyndsey de Mestre QC) recorded at [42] the barrister’s acceptance that: “the right to political speech is not entirely unfettered and would lose its highly protected status where the manner of expression of the political view involves gratuitous personal abuse, derogatory racist or sexist language, such as was found in the tweets examined in Diggins v BSB, or ‘grossly