Anti-Choice Extremist Troy Newman Deported From Australia
Troy Newman, head of extreme anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and board member of the Center for Medical Progress (whose deceptively edited “sting” videos attacking Planned Parenthood have set off a firestorm of dishonest right wing outrage), has been deported from Australia after arriving in the country despite having his visa revoked.
Newman’s visa was canceled earlier this week after Australian authorities learned that he advocates executing abortion doctors. Newman is also infamous for coming to the defense of anti-choice murderer Paul Jennings Hill, saying that Hill was justified in killing Dr. John Britton and his bodyguard in 1994. His group, Operation Rescue, is notorious for its associations with violent anti-abortion extremists; their “senior policy adviser,” Cheryl Sullenger, spent two years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic.
Newman filed an appeal with Australia’s High Court, trying to stop his deportation, but it was denied — and he will now have to pay the commonwealth’s legal costs as well.
In making his decision in the high court in Melbourne on Friday, Justice Geoffrey Nettle highlighted Newman’s “consummate disregard” for Australian laws, by travelling to Australia with knowledge his visa had been cancelled. “He does not come to this court with clean hands,” Nettle said.
The high court justice noted a recording Newman took of him being stopped at Denver airport because he did not have a valid visa as evidence the campaigner knew his visa had been denied.
Airline workers had urged him to contact the Australian embassy before travelling on, Nettle said.
Despite disagreeing with the visa cancellation, Newman had “no right to treat it as nought,” Nettle said. He was “determinedly and avidly” intent on travelling to Australia, the justice said. “He is the author of his own misfortune and predicament.”