Australian Holocaust revisionist Gerald Fredrick Toben has been remanded in custody and faces extradition to Germany and a possible five-year jail term after being arrested at Heathrow Airport in London yesterday in dramatic circumstances.
Toben had just boarded a flight to Dubai after arriving from the United States just before midday, London time, when he was arrested on a European warrant for continuing to publish anti-semitic material on his website, the Adelaide Institute. He apparently tried to avoid police by changing seats.
The retired 64-year-old former school teacher, who has previously spent time in a German prison for the same offence, told a special hearing of the Westminster Magistrate's Court later in the day that he was a "victim of legal persecution".
"It's a witch trial mentality in Germany, which is not the case in England yet," he said, adding that he faced jail in Australia because of his continuing to publish material despite a Federal Court gag order. "I can't run anywhere - the world is my prison."
But the plea fell on deaf ears. District Judge Nicholas Evans refused Toben bail and he was remanded in custody until another extradition hearing on Friday.
Toben set up the Adelaide Institute in 1994 to spread his theories denying the Holocaust. He spent seven months in a German prison in 1999 for inciting racism before being granted bail and heading back to Australia, where in 2002 he was ordered to cease his activities.
But he continued, claiming on the website: "If you wish to begin to doubt the Holocaust-Shoah narrative, you must be prepared for personal sacrifice, must be prepared for marriage and family break-up, loss of career, and go to prison."
Last year the former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Jeremy Jones, asked the Federal Court to jail Toben for breaching the order.
Two years ago, he attended a conference hosted by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran in 2006, during which he gave a speech calling for evidence of the Nazi gas chambers, "the products of a feverish pathological mind filled with pure hatred, mostly directed against Germans and anything German ... the product of an appalling state of ignorance of natural and chemical processes".
The EU warrant for Mr Toben's arrest was issued by Germany, and reads: "From 2002 to this day the worldwide, internet publication of an anti-Semitic and, or, revisionist nature deliberately contrary to historical truth the said publications deny, approve or play down above all the mass murder of the Jews, planned and implemented, by the national socialist rulers."
If he is extradited to Germany, Toben faces charges of publishing material on the internet of "an anti-semitic and/or revisionist nature that denies, approves of or plays down" the mass murder of Jews by the Nazi regime, the court was told.
Tina Whybrow, lawyer for District Court of Mannheim, said Mr Toben was accused of computer-related crime and racism and xenophobia: "This is a serious offence, the penalty for this offence is up to five years' (imprisonment)," she said.
