An Australian judge has thrown out a defamation case by a convicted Holocaust denier against a Jewish leader.
Federal Court judge David Yates ruled against Adelaide’s Fredrick Toben last week in the case he brought against Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
In his judgment, Justice Yates described Toben’s case as “an abuse of the court’s process” and ordered that the proceedings be stayed permanently.
The judge noted that Dr Toben’s defamation case was only lodged in May 2012 — two weeks after he failed in an attempt to avoid being taxed on Mr Jones’s costs he was ordered to pay from a previous contempt-of-court ruling.
“It was that circumstance which apparently spurred the applicant to commence the present proceeding,” the judge wrote.
He also ordered Toben to pay Mr Jones’s costs.
Toben claimed he had been defamed by Mr Jones in an article which was published in the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council magazine in August 2009.
Toben alleged that the article accused him of being an antisemite who believed the Holocaust was a fraud.
“The important thing is that the matter is now over,” Mr Jones said.
Toben, who was recently declared bankrupt, was arrested at Heathrow airport in 2008 and remanded in custody for continuing to publish antisemitic material on his Adelaide Institute website in defiance of a court order. The following year he was jailed in Australia for three months for contempt of the court order.
