London: London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been suspended for a month after a disciplinary tribunal found he had brought his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.
The Adjudication Panel for England -- an independent tribunal which hears complaints against local authority members -- on Friday ruled unanimously that Livingstone should be suspended for four weeks starting March 1.
It said his remarks to Oliver Finegold, a reporter for the London Evening Standard, on February 8 last year had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive".
The three-man panel's chairman, David Laverick, said they did not think it appropriate to disqualify the mayor from office, but were concerned he had failed to appreciate his conduct was unacceptable and damaging to his office.
"His representative is quite right in saying that matters should not have got as far as this but it is the mayor who must take responsibility for this," he added.
"It was his comments that started the matter and thereafter his position seems to have become ever more entrenched."
The 60-year-old Mayor immediately criticised the panel's ruling as one that "strikes at the heart of democracy".
"Elected politicians should only be able to be removed by the voters or for breaking the law," he added, finding support from his deputy and soon-to-be acting mayor Nicky Gavron, whose mother was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
Some in the Greater London Authority described the ruling as a "hysterical overreaction" while others called for him to step down.
Newspaper editorialists criticised the decision by an unelected body even while denouncing the mayor's remarks.
Livingstone, nicknamed "Red Ken" for his socialist views, was re-elected mayor of western Europe's most populous city in June 2004 under the banner of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party.
His remarks to Finegold led to calls from Jewish groups, Holocaust survivors and politicians, including Blair, for an apology, but none has been forthcoming.
The country's leading Jewish organisation, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which brought the case, said Livingstone had been "the architect of his own downfall" in his refusal to say sorry.
Finegold said meanwhile in a two-page article about the incident on Friday that his ancestors came to the British capital from Russia at the turn of the 20th century.
"I can't believe that a year has passed since the original incident and that Mr Livingstone is still to apologise," he wrote.
"My great-grandparents would have been staggered to discover that the Mayor of the city that gave them refuge should have turned on me with such venom."
Livingstone claimed the jibes were triggered by his dislike of Associated Newspapers, which owns the Evening Standard, and its sister national paper the Daily Mail.
He had argued they referred to the Daily Mail's reputed support for fascism and opposition to Jewish refugees in the 1930s and to a leaving party thrown for an outgoing editor in which some guests were reportedly dressed as Nazis.
Evening Standard editor Veronica Wadley wrote in the newspaper on Friday that the mayor's behaviour was disappointing because of his background as a "pioneering anti-racist campaigner".
He had disgraced himself and his office, she said, hoping that he would now finally apologise and restore his reputation.
The Daily Mail, the Standard's sister paper, echoed much of the print media when it renewed its denunciation of the mayor's remarks, but said that "however odious, Livingstone was democratically chosen by the people of London.
"Shouldn't they determine his fate, rather than a remote, unelected tribunal?" it asked.
Livingstone, who can appeal but is liable for costs estimated at up to £80,000 pounds ($139,000), was not at Friday's hearing.
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