Holocaust denier jailed

German-born Fredrick Toben was found guilty of defying a court order from 2002 that had ordered him to stop publishing anti-Semitic material on his organization's website, the Adelaide Institute.

Australian Federal Court judge Bruce Lander sentenced the 65-year-old to three months in prison, saying that "evidence showed a continuing public defiance of the authority of the court."

Following his sentencing, Toben told reporters that he was ready to go to jail and was willing to do so "for the sake of free expression."

"The world is my prison, where can I run to?" he said.

Toben was arrested in Britain in October last year, under an arrest warrant issued in Germany, where he faces charges of publishing material on the Internet "of an anti-Semitic and/or revisionist nature" which denies, approves of or, or plays down the Holocaust. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany, punishable by up to five years imprisonment.

A British court ruled against extraditing him to Germany.

Toben has previously been jailed in both Germany and Austria for declaring there were no mass killings of Jews in World War II.

In 2006 he was a speaker at a controversial conference in Tehran organized by the Iranian government and attended by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There, he described as "mere puffery" the assertion that the Nazis undertook mass killings of Jews.