The full court of the Federal Court in Sydney has dismissed Australian special forces veteran Ben Robert Smith’s appeal to have a multi-million-dollar defamation loss overturned.

Mr Roberts-Smith sued in 2023 over a series of articles published five years earlier about allegations of war crimes in Afghanistan, bullying and domestic violence against a woman in Canberra.

In late March, his lawyers began an eleventh-hour bid to add a further ground of appeal by arguing there was a miscarriage of justice in the original trial.