Mr Justice COLLINS : 1. This is an appeal pursuant to s.79(15) of the Local Government Act 2000 (the 2000 Act) by Mr Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, against the decision of a Case Tribunal of the Respondent which decided that the appellant had failed to comply with the Code of Conduct of the Greater London Authority. On 24 February 2006 the Tribunal directed that the appellant should be suspended for a period of four weeks from 1 March 2006. That suspension was itself suspended by Ouseley J pending the determination of this appeal. 2. The Respondent itself has not appeared but the Ethical Standards Officer (ESO) whose report led to the hearing before the Tribunal and who presented the case against the appellant, has presented arguments in favour of upholding the decision that there has been a failure to comply with the Code of Conduct. He did not present any argument in support of the sanction. This was consistent with his approach to the hearing before the Tribunal, where counsel on his behalf had said:“… we can indicate to you now that for our part we will certainly not be pressing you to exercise your powers of, for example, suspension or disqualification in relation to the Mayor, as is plain from the fact that Mr Kingston would otherwise have referred the matter to the Monitoring Officer under paragraph (c).” 3. The absence of an appearance by the Respondent is consistent with its usual practice, which is to leave to the ESO the task of making representations and adducing arguments to the court on its behalf. But in a letter of 15 March 2006 to the court, the President referred to the fact that ‘a large part of the first two days of the Case Tribunal’s hearing was taken up with considering the appellant’s arguments that the Case Tribunal did not have jurisdiction to deal with the matter because of alleged procedural defects on the part of the ESO who had investigated the matter’. He went on to indicate that there was some dispute whether the Case Tribunal should have considered those arguments and he asked the court, if possible, to give some guidance on the point. Neither counsel had raised the issue in their very helpful and full skeleton arguments and at the outset of the hearing I asked each if he would be good enough to give some thought to it. They helpfully did so, but I am conscious that I have not been asked to nor have I gone into the issue in any depth. 4. The President of the Tribunal and those who act as chairmen of the Case Tribunal, are, as I understand, legally qualified. Whether or not that is so, it seems to me, that the Tribunal must have the power to ensure that it does have jurisdiction to consider a case and so can decide, if the question is raised, whether there have been any defects of procedure such as to render it unfair or outside the Tribunal’s jurisdiction to proceed. It can and should decide, for example, whether to proceed would be so unfair to the individual whose conduct was under investigation as to render it an abuse of the process to proceed. But it must, I think, apply the law as set out in the statutory provisions, which of course include the relevant Regulations and the relevant Code of Conduct, unless the Code in question does not comply with the Regulations. It cannot entertain arguments that go to the vires of any of the statutory provisions: these must be addressed to this court through a claim for judicial review. While I must emphasise that these observations are not based on full argument, I did not understand counsel to dissent from them. Mr Morshead did raise a caveat, with which I agree, that in a given case the Tribunal might properly consider that it was more appropriate for a particular issue to be