In her 117-page judgment, magistrate Scerri Herrera said that to a person of average intellect, Lowell’s comments are tantamount to racial hatred.

She referred to Lowell’s description of Jews as parasites and his criticism of Maltese families who adopted African children, where he said he would not like his children to mingle with children from Katanga or Mozambique.

Police superintendent Peter Paul Zammit had testified during the case, saying he had investigated Lowell’s articles featured on website www.vivamalta.org in which he had written disparagingly about Sudanese people at a local nightclub.

Lowell had called the President of Malta a “lousy president but a ... Good gardener”, with reference to the state in which San Anton Garden is kept.

Accompanied by his lawyer Emmy Bezzina, “a fellow libertinarian”, whom he thanked for representing him for free and with whom he said he shared a love of freedom, Lowell scathingly attacked the courts.

The Imperium Europa leader commented that it was a sad day for Malta and the Maltese. He accused the “putrid establishment” of dictating to the people what they should do and think.

He described the judgment as a return to the Middle Ages and said that they way he was silenced was akin that to what happened in the 1960s, when people were “condemned to eternal flames” for reading a newspaper.

Lowell announced that he would shortly publish his new book entitled Imperium Europa, which will be his party’s manifesto for next year’s European Parliament elections.

He warned the “taciturn media which vilified us” that he was fighting his personal battle for their benefit, as they too would be hit by the establishment’s censorship.

Dr Bezzina said the judgment merits a profound study as it could affect the basic rights enjoyed by the Maltese as EU citizens.

He held that the Maltese people’s freedom of expression, right to free thinking, opinion and writing were undermined, as curbing such freedoms was tantamount to paralysing people.