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Prince Harry was expected with great anticipation this Monday morning in London court, in the case he brought against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), but did not attend, despite being in the United Kingdom.
The prince accuses the media group of alleged wiretapping carried out over several years and at a stage when he was still very young. Harry was expected to be the first witness of the day. The lawyer, David Sherborne, said the client is in the UK and flew in from Los Angeles yesterday after celebrating his daughter’s birthday. Lilibet Diana, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, turned 2 this Sunday. For Harry, there are more complicated “travel and security issues” than for the other witnesses, according to Sherborne, quoted by Sky News.
The judge, Mr Fancourt, said he was “a bit surprised” by Harry’s absence on Monday. MGN representative Andrew Green KC accused Harry of making court a “waste of time”.
In the initial allegations, Harry’s lawyer argued that the prince was “subject to the unlawful collection of information” from the time he was a child, even at the time of his mother’s death. This trial focuses on a stage in the young prince’s life in which he was trying to build relationships “in a world where much of what he did was reported,” Sky News quotes. “Nothing was sacrosanct or off limits” to journalists added David Sherborne.
You have to go back over a century to find the last member of the royal family to sit in the witness box to testify. More precisely in 1891, when the heir to the throne and son of Queen Victoria was called to testify in the Royal Baccarat Scandal, a case of cheating in the card game.
As Prince Harry’s case against MGN was being held in court late in the morning, the royal house released a message of condolences from the kings to the president of India after the train accident that killed nearly 300 people. During this week, Carlos III will spend five days in Transylvania, Romania, hiking, according to The Telegraph, so he will not meet Harry during his stay in the United Kingdom. The queen will not accompany you.
The King has sent a message of condolences to the President of India following the train accident in Odisha:
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) June 5, 2023
This is just one of the cases that Prince Harry has in the British court against the media.
In March, the prince made a surprise appearance in London on the first day of the preliminary hearing in a case pitting seven celebrities against the Associated Newspapers group, which owns the Daily Mail newspaper, over alleged wiretapping and payments for confidential information that resulted in “serious intrusions of privacy”. Harry is joined by singer Elton John and her husband David Furnish, as well as actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost.
The third case is against News Group Newspapers and concerns the alleged tapping of the prince’s voicemails by The Sun newspaper in the early 2000s. In this case, the prince provided written testimony alleging that his brother, Prince William, received a “large sum” of money from Rupert Murdoch’s British media group in a secret deal to quietly settle allegations that the royal family’s mobile phones had been hacked in 2020. NGN denies the allegations. accusations.
Harry had another problem with British justice, which was resolved last May. Since stepping down as senior members of the royal family in early 2020 to move out of the UK, the prince and his wife Meghan Markle have lost their right to taxpayer-funded police protection. Harry tried to pay for police security when he returned to the UK with his family, but in February of that year the Home Office decided that the Prince would no longer have personal police security while in Britain, even if he paid for her. Harry applied to the British High Court for permission for a judicial review of this decision, but was denied last March.
Source: Observadora
