{"id":25670,"date":"2023-07-13T04:22:08","date_gmt":"2023-07-13T08:22:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/?p=25670"},"modified":"2023-07-13T04:22:08","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T08:22:08","slug":"ben-roberts-smith-australias-top-soldier-appeals-over-war-crimes-defamation-trial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/2023\/07\/13\/ben-roberts-smith-australias-top-soldier-appeals-over-war-crimes-defamation-trial\/","title":{"rendered":"Ben Roberts-Smith: Australia’s top soldier appeals over war crimes defamation trial"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Australia’s most-decorated living soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is appealing against a landmark defamation judgement which found he committed war crimes.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A judge last month ruled articles alleging the Victoria Cross recipient had murdered four Afghans were true.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It was the first time in history any court has assessed claims of war crimes by Australian forces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr Roberts-Smith is not facing criminal charges and maintains his innocence. His grounds for appeal are unknown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The former special forces corporal sued three Australian newspapers over a series of articles alleging serious misconduct while he was deployed in Afghanistan between 2009-2012 as part of a US-led military coalition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At the time the articles were published in 2018, Mr Roberts-Smith was considered a national hero, having been awarded Australia’s highest military honour for single-handedly overpowering Taliban fighters attacking his Special Air Service (SAS) platoon.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The 44-year-old claimed the papers ruined his life with their reports that he had broken the moral and legal rules of war.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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His defamation case – dubbed by some “the trial of the century” – lasted 110 days and was rumoured to have cost up to A$25m ($16.3m; \u00a313.2m).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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On 1 June a Federal Court judge threw out the case against The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Canberra Times, ruling it was “substantially true” that Mr Roberts-Smith had murdered unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians and bullied fellow soldiers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Justice Anthony Besanko also found that Mr Roberts-Smith lied to cover up his misconduct and threatened witnesses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Additional allegations that he had punched his lover, threatened a peer, and committed two other murders were not proven to the “balance of probabilities” standard required in civil cases.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr Roberts-Smith, who left the defence force in 2013, has not been charged over any of the claims in a criminal court, where there is a higher burden of proof.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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None of the evidence presented in the civil defamation case against Mr Roberts-Smith can be used in any criminal proceedings, meaning investigators must gather their own independently.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But the case has raised the spectre of a possible wider reckoning over claims of war crimes by Australian forces.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In 2020, a landmark investigation known as the Brereton Report found “credible evidence” that elite Australian soldiers unlawfully killed 39 people in Afghanistan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It recommended that 19 current or former soldiers should be investigated over alleged killings of prisoners and civilians from 2009-13.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Australian troops were deployed to Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, as part of a US-led coalition that ousted the Taliban after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States. The Taliban retook control of Afghanistan in 2021.<\/p>\n

Source: bbc.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Australia’s most-decorated living soldier Ben Roberts-Smith is appealing against a landmark defamation judgement which found he committed war crimes. A judge last month ruled articles alleging the Victoria Cross recipient had murdered four Afghans were […]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25671,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[350,109,2,6],"tags":[2992,819,1023,850],"class_list":{"0":"post-25670","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-australia","8":"category-headline","9":"category-news","10":"category-world","11":"tag-afghanistan","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-defamation","14":"tag-war-crimes","15":"pmpro-has-access"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25670"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25673,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25670\/revisions\/25673"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}