Australian court rejects One Nation leader's appeal in discrimination case involving Muslim senator

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - SYDNEY — An ​Australian court on Monday upheld the finding that right-wing leader Pauline Hanson engaged in racial discrimination against Pakistan-born Mehreen Faruqi when she tweeted the Greens senator should “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”.

The One Nation leader launched the appeal in November, almost a month after Justice Angus Stewart found Hanson engaged in “seriously offensive” and intimidating behavior against Faruqi in the September 2022 social media post that breached the Racial Discrimination Act.

The three-judge panel of the Full Federal Court of Australia unanimously upheld the 2024 ruling that the comment was unlawful and unprotected by free speech defenses.

“Today, justice has prevailed,” Faruqi told reporters outside court in Sydney. “Today’s win is for every single person out there who has been told to go ‌back to where ‌you came from.”

Hanson said in a statement she ​was ‌disappointed ⁠in the outcome, ​and ⁠that public discussion in Australia had become “almost totally silenced by laws and rules which prevent ordinary people expressing their personal views.”

“My legal team and I will now closely review the decision in the coming days, with a view to commencing an appeal in the High Court of Australia,” she added. The High Court of Australia is the country’s final court of appeal.

The proceedings centered around an interaction the pair had on Twitter, now X, following the death of ‌Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022.

Faruqi ⁠posted on Twitter that she could not “mourn ‌the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, ​land and wealth of colonized peoples.”

Hanson replied: “When ‌you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country... It’s clear you’re ‌not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.”

Faruqi, who moved to Australia from Pakistan in 1992 and is the first Muslim woman to be a member of any Australian parliament, sued Hanson over the remark.

A judge in 2024 found it breached Australia’s laws against racial discrimination as ‌it was reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Faruqi, as well as Muslim Australians and people of color who had ⁠migrated to the country.

Hanson ⁠appealed the decision, arguing she did not breach the law and the law was in any case constitutionally invalid.

But the Full Federal Court agreed with the earlier decision, dismissing all grounds of appeal in a lengthy judgment.

The court said it agreed with the previous judgment, which “correctly characterized” Hanson’s post as containing an anti-Muslim and Islamophobic message and “being a variant of the historically racist, nativist and anti-immigrant slogan ‘go back to where you came from’.”

The law was also constitutionally valid, and Hanson did not establish a defense allowing for fair comment on a matter of public interest, it said.

“We have 434 paragraphs of dismissing Pauline Hanson’s appeal, of confirming that indeed Pauline Hanson behaved in racism, Islamophobia, and hate,” Faruqi said.

“Hate ​speech is not free speech, and ​the Federal Court has reaffirmed that today.”

Founded in 1997, One Nation was long seen as fringe but Hanson’s hard line on immigration has drawn more support in recent polls.