A Labour party panel’s decision to readmit Chris Williamson despite his record of supporting antisemites has been further questioned after the discovery of highly controversial comments made by one of the panellists.

Huda Elmi was part of the three-person panel from Labour’s National Executive Committee which decided on Wednesday to let the Derby North MP off with a warning, rejecting a recommendation by party officials to refer him to the next stage of Labour's disciplinary process.

Ms Elmi, who was elected to the party’s NEC as part of the far-left “JC [Jeremy Corbyn] 9” slate last year, called for the Equality and Human Rights Commission to be shut down on the day it announced that its preliminary investigation of antisemitism in Labour.

Hours after the EHRC said, regarding antisemitism, that it believed “the Labour Party may have unlawfully discriminated against people because of their ethnicity and religious beliefs”, Ms Elmi described the anti-racism watchdog as “a failed experiment…we need to abolish it.”

She also described the Labour Party’s decision, after considerable delay, to adopt the full International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, as “incredibly disappointing.”

Video footage has also emerged of Ms Elmi at an event last year describing Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and Jeremy Corbyn as a “pro Palestinian leader.

“When we look at financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, who literally have money stained with blood…of course they weren’t going to respect Jeremy’s mandate,” she went on to say.

There is no record of either the IMF [International Monetary Fund] or the World Bank making any comment about Jeremy Corbyn, although there is video footage of Jeremy Corbyn from 2010 claiming that “"They-the world's bankers, the IMF, the European Union - are utterly united in what they want: deflation, suppressing the economy & creating unemployment."

Ms Elmi also dismissed Rachel Riley, a Jewish TV presenter who has been vocal on the subject of antisemitism in the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn's lack of action on the issue, as "an attention seeker."

Last month, in response to an article by Jon Lansman, the leader of the Momentum far-left group and her political ally, which claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had wanted to act on Labour antisemitism but had been "held back by bureaucracy", Ms Elmi claimed that there had been "weaponisation of racism by anti Corbyn forces", which she labelled "disgusting", saying she hoped "the party investigates those who undermined the fight against antisemitism in order to score political points."

Of the three members of the NEC panel, only one, George Howarth, said that Mr Williamson's case should be referred to a panel of Labour's highest body, the National Constitution Committee. Ms Elmi and Keith Vaz, a Labour MP, overruled Mr Howarth. 

Alex Sobel, a Jewish Labour MP, tweeted praising Mr Howarth for his decision. He did not mention the two other members of the panel by name, but said he knew who had "voted to give Chris Williamson a slap on the wrist and I won’t forget that they failed to be an ally."