Australia’s High Court has ended Ben Roberts-Smith’s last chance to overturn devastating legal findings against him. The ruling means the most decorated living Australian soldier remains branded, in civil law, as responsible for unlawful killings and serious misconduct in Afghanistan. It is the final chapter in a six-year legal fight that began as an attempt to protect his reputation but instead exposed him as the central figure in Australia’s reckoning with its conduct during the war in Afghanistan.

The High Court announced Thursday it would not hear Roberts-Smith’s appeal of a 2023 Federal Court decision that found four murder allegations against him were substantially true. That verdict came after an extraordinary 110-day defamation trial, one of the longest and most expensive in Aus

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