Independent councillor Ben Duncan will appeal the “Kafka-esque” disciplinary panel decision to strip him of his deputy committee chair roles because of two “offensive” tweets he posted.

The former Green councillor was found to have breached Brighton and Hove City Council’s code of conduct over two tweets he made in June following a five hours standards panel yesterday.

The hearing ruled that he should be stripped of his deputy chair roles at two licensing committees, which comes with an annual £1,252 allowance, and given “formal censure” as a punishment for “somebody who repeatedly brought the council into disrepute”.

But the controversy is set to rumble on more than three months after the tweets were posted with the Queen’s Park councillor set to challenge the ruling which he described as “arrogant” for overriding his human right to freedom of expression.

One of the scores of residents who complained about the tweets said after the ruling that the punishment was not “severe” enough and that he would have wanted to see Coun Duncan removed from public office.

A cross-party panel of councillors, Leo Littman, Ann Norman, and Jeane Lepper, along with Dr David Horne as independent chairman, made the decision after a hearing yesterday.

The charges relate to one tweet in June in which Coun Duncan, then a Green councillor, described soldiers marching through Brighton on Armed Forces Day as “hired killers”.

The tweet received the most number of complaints the council had received for any single incident - 60.

Asked by Green councillor Leo Littman whether he still stood by his comments, Coun Duncan said: "Yes in as much they are hired in that they receive a salary and killers reflects what is an contractual obligation.

"I am not suggesting every member has killed but they must be prepared when push comes to shove when obeying a superior officer."

A second charge related to a tweet he wrote in the same month which read: “Blasphemous 7yo wants ‘Islam book’ to press flowers in (it’s big and heavy). Should I stone her to death when I get home from work?”

The tweet provoked a complaint from Sunny Choudhury, president of the Brighton District Bangladeshi Shomity, who said after the ruling yesterday: “I am pleased in a way but the sentence should have been stronger.

“His tweets caused a very, very deep hurt, everybody was horrified and on that day I had 40 plus people in my house and everybody was deeply hurt.”

Coun Duncan said in reference to the council’s own code of conduct that councillors should only be judged by “the law or the ballot box” and also warned of the risk of creating rules for a private club that put an “unnecessary restriction on the members of that club”.

Speaking after the ruling, he said: “It seems to me this ruling was a ruling that human rights of freedom of expression guaranteed in the Human Rights Act don’t apply to councillors and I think that’s a very strange ruling and a very arrogant ruling.”

Chairman Dr Horne said the panel had taken legal advice and that 10.2 of the article allowed the council to interfere with article 10 rights.

Coun Duncan said that he needed to “go away and think about what I do next” when asked whether he would stay on as an independent councillor until next May’s election.

Coun Duncan also said he was worried that councillors would think twice before speaking their mind on Twitter following his case and that would be “bad for democracy”.

Asked during the hearing whether he regretted sending the tweets, Coun Duncan said: "We are all here wasting time, I have had the whip removed and I am no longer a member of the Green Party and in the process of all this I am no longer employed so with respect I would not have wanted all of that to have happened."