By Tim Dornin | August 13, 2009
HOLOCAUST denier Fredrick Toben has been taken into custody to serve a three-month jail term over publishing offensive material on the internet.
The 64-year-old was taken from the Federal Court in Adelaide by Australian Federal Police today after losing his appeal against his conviction for contempt of court.
The Full Court of the Federal Court also ruled that his jail term, originally imposed in May this year, was in no way excessive.
"In our opinion, the sentence of three months cannot, on any stretch of the imagination, be considered excessive or unwarranted," the three-judge panel said.
The judges said Toben also had a disregard for the orders of the court and had acted to undermine the authority of the court.
Earlier this year, Toben was found guilty on 24 counts of contempt for ignoring a previous court order preventing him from publishing racist material on the Adelaide Institute website. When he later imposed a three-month sentence, Justice Bruce Lander said Toben had continued to breach those 2002 orders, which prevented him from publishing specific anti-Semitic material.
The 2002 orders stemmed from a racial discrimination case brought against him by Jeremy Jones, a former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.
In his final submissions today, counsel for Toben, David Perkins, suggested the material published on the Adelaide Institute website, which questioned whether the holocaust even occurred, was just a "drop in the bucket" compared to the amount of revisionist material available on the internet.
But in their verdict, the judges said the case before them was not about the holocaust, gas chambers or the execution of Jews during World War II. They said it was about whether or not Toben had complied with orders of the court.
"Obedience to the court is not optional," they said.
As the court rose, Toben asked if he could say something to the judges, only to be cut off by Justice Jeffrey Spender who simply said, "No".
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