Human rights lawyer George Newhouse has won his defamation case against controversial News Corp blogger Andrew Bolt.
In the NSW Supreme Court on Thursday, Justice Lucy McCallum ordered a verdict for Mr Newhouse and said News Corp was to pay his legal costs.
The terms of the order - agreed to by both parties - requires the article to be taken down from News Corp's various online sites. Other terms of the settlement are confidential.
Mr Newhouse sued over an opinion piece written by Bolt on July 10, 2014, which carried the headline "Fearmongers' hateful fraud" in The Herald Sun.
It was also published in The Daily Telegraph, The Courier Mail and The Advertiser.
In it, Bolt claimed Mr Newhouse was part of the "refugee lobby", which, he said, had fraudulently asserted that certain Sri Lankan people who had arrived by boat in Australia were genuine asylum seekers.
Bolt wrote that 41 Sri Lankan asylum seekers had recently been forcibly returned by the Australian navy because they were "economic migrants and not genuine asylum seekers".
He then said a separate group of 153 Sri Lankan asylum seekers, who were represented by Mr Newhouse in the High Court, were not more likely to be "true refugees" than the 41 who had been returned.
"So if a crime against morality has been committed, it is surely this: that so many atrocity mongers and moral posers have inflicted upon us a gigantic fraud," Bolt said.
Mr Newhouse sued for defamation. In a judgment handed down on December 11, 2014, Justice McCallum found the five defamatory imputations pleaded by Mr Newhouse were capable of arising. These included that Mr Newhouse "has fraudulently represented to the public that people whom he represents are refugees when they are not"; that he "lied to the High Court"; that he is "motivated by deceit" and that he has "acted immorally".
Lawyers for News Corp had applied to have the imputations struck out.
Justice McCallum said she agreed with the submission of Mr Newhouse's barrister, Sue Chrysanthou, that "the whole thrust of the article is to expose the fraud of the representation that his clients were refugees".
Further, she said the following paragraph written by Bolt did give rise to an imputation of deliberate dishonesty to the High Court.
"Mr Newhouse and barrister Ron Merkel QC have persuaded the High Court to issue a temporary injunction against returning these 153 to Sri Lanka and the same superheated rhetoric is heard about torture, the 'disappeared' and Nazis," Bolt said.
Bolt's article opened with the line: "Here's conclusive proof that our 'refugee lobby' is motivated by deceit, self-preening and insane hatred of the Abbott Government."
Justice McCallum said that paragraph gave rise to the imputation of motivation by deceit.
In the final orders the defendants were listed as Nationwide News, Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times.
Outside the court Mr Newhouse said the verdict "has vindicated my reputation".
"All I was doing was standing up for the little man. I assisted a group of extraordinarily vulnerable men, women and children to make sure that they received fair treatment by the Australian government and that they were not sent back to harm," Mr Newhouse said.
"It was unnecessary, and hurtful, to be attacked for just doing my job."
A spokesman for News Corp said: "The matter has settled and therefore did not proceed to trial so there was no judicial determination of the issues in dispute."
