Australian Court Orders Holocaust Denial Site Down
Justice Branson, in the Federal Court of Australia, has ordered (the judgment is on Austlii - available here) Frederick Toben to remove material from the Web which denied the Holocaust happened, and villified Jewish people. The court found that the material was "reasonably likely, in all of the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Jewish Australians or a group of Jewish Australians." The case was so clear that Branson J was able to give summary judgment in the case.
Toben's conduct was held to contravene the Racial Discrimination Act, s18C, which makes it unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if the act:
(a) is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and
(b) is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group (here, the court found that Toben had published the material "because of the ethnic origin of Jewish Australians").
Legally, this sounds reasonably clear cut to me, and since Australia has no equivalent to the First Amendment of the United States, or Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, there is no overriding defence - just illustrating how differerent it is when you don't have a bill of rights. Can you imagine a summary judgment (that is, the case is so clear it doesn't even have to go to trial) in many other Western jurisdictions? The Australian Council for Civil Liberties has criticised the decision, saying it would interfere with a person's fundamental right of freedom of speech.

"No matter how stupid and misguided Toben's views are, freedom of speech means the right to be stupid."

This is not the first time Dr Toben has been in trouble - according to Reuters he was jailed in Germany in 1999 for 7 months on charges of inciting hatred through pamphlets, but acquitted on charges about his website by a German court, after the court said the website was run on computers outside Germany, and outside its jurisdiction. Dr Toben represented himself in the Federal Court action - and does not appear to have made life easy for the court, or himself - having made various accusations against the applicant of initiating "Stalinist -like court actions" and engaging in "blatant totalitarian behaviour". (paragraph 27 of the judgment), and causing various delays in the proceedings over time.
Bits from the web site are included in the judgment.
Story in the Australian about the decision here.