The Canadian Human Rights Commission yesterday ordered Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel to kill off a Web site featuring hate propaganda that targets Jews and the Holocaust.

The commission said that whatever free-speech protection may exist for hate material on the Internet is vastly outweighed by the social benefits of eliminating hate-mongering.

"It bears repeating that the expression in those documents does nothing to advance the underlying values of freedom of expression," commissioners Claude Pensa and Reva Devins said.

Michelle Falardeau-Ramsay, chief commissioner of the CHRC, said the impact of the unregulated Internet to spread hatred could not be underestimated.

The ruling came six years -- and millions of dollars in legal expenses -- after Mr. Zundel was accused of using his so-called Zundelsite to continue a life-long battle against Jews.

The commission conceded that ordering Mr. Zundel to "cease and desist" from using his Web site has a certain futility. It noted that the material can be easily transferred to any number of "mirror sites" where sympathizers could recreate it.

However, law professor Ed Morgan, a senior official with the Canadian Jewish Congress, said the human-rights battle has been more than worthwhile.

"There is a lot of symbolic value in this," Prof. Morgan said in an interview. "This has got to be a blow to the Canadian-based, neo-Nazi movement. If there are Canadian-based sites, this will shut them down."

Prof. Morgan said the ruling is in line with a provision the federal government put in its recent antiterrorism bill that permits the regulation of Internet material.

After interrupting the human-rights inquiry with legal motions and appeals since 1996, Mr. Zundel suddenly announced last year that he had lost interest in fighting it.

In an interview yesterday from his new home in the Smoky Mountain region of Tennessee, Mr. Zundel had little to say about a ruling he described as tiresome and irrelevant.

"You're talking to the new Ernst Zundel," he said. "They used to accuse me of Holocaust denial. Well, now I'm in Canada-denial. I have put Canada behind me."

Mr. Zundel, who remarried recently and sells his own paintings for a living, said he does not intend to risk returning to Canada, lest he be stopped on some pretext at the border.

"I'm not going to give them the satisfaction," he said. "I will not set foot in Canada again."

The commission described the Zundelsite yesterday as a place in which "Jews are vilified in the most rabid and extreme manner," equating it to a schoolyard bully whose constant taunting "can erode an individual's personal dignity and self-worth."

The commissioners added that the ease with which vast amounts of hate information can be posted on the Internet renders it a much greater threat to social harmony than the telephone ever was.