Ben Roberts-Smith's last-ditch bid to overturn war crimes decision
Australia's most decorated living soldier has launched a last-ditch bid to overturn damning findings that he committed war crimes while on deployment in Afghanistan.
Former Special Air Service corporal Ben Roberts-Smith filed an application on Monday for special leave to appeal in the High Court after losing a court challenge to a Federal Court defamation decision that concluded he was complicit in the murder of four Afghan prisoners.
Roberts-Smith has been locked in the defamation fight with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald for eight years.
In 2023, then-Federal Court justice Anthony Besanko dismissed his defamation case against the mastheads after he found to the civil standard – on the balance of probabilities – that Roberts-Smith was involved in the four murders between 2009 and 2012.
The Full Court of the Federal Court upheld Besanko's decision on May 16.
Federal Court Justices Nye Perram, Anna Katzmann and Geoffrey Kennett found the evidence was sufficiently cogent to support Besanko's findings that Roberts-Smith murdered four Afghan men, contrary to the rules of engagement that bound the SAS.
'The problem for [Roberts-Smith] is that, unlike most homicides, there were three eyewitnesses to this murder.'
Full Court of the Federal Court
At the centre of the case was an allegation that Roberts-Smith machine-gunned a man with a prosthetic leg outside a compound dubbed Whiskey 108 during a mission on Easter Sunday, 2009.
'The problem for [Roberts-Smith] is that, unlike most homicides, there were three eyewitnesses to this murder,' the court said.
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