Prince Harry has lost the game in the face of British justice in his case against the Daily Mail , the right-wing populist tabloid accused of having conducted illegal wiretaps for years against him and six other co-denunciant celebrities including Elton John, Liz Hurley and Doreen Lawrence, an anti-racism activist.

Judge Matthew Nicklin of the High Court in London, in a verdict delivered today, coinciding with the start of an eagerly awaited visit to the kingdom by the second son of King Charles III, ruled that the illicit activity "had not been proven" and did not find the publisher directly responsible.

In the summary accompanying a lengthy 436-page ruling, Judge Nicklin states that Harry, Elton John, and the other five public figures involved in the complaint against the Mail were unable to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the tabloid's alleged intrusions into their privacy were carried out through wiretapping or other forms of illegal information gathering. The judge specifies that, although the legitimate origin of the information in question has not been proven, the opposite hypothesis—that it was "illegally obtained"—has not been proven either.

The contested facts were published by the tabloid between 1993 and 2018 in a number of more or less sensationalist articles.

Lawyers for the Duke of Sussex and the other complainants had sought direct liability on the part of the publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), while the newspaper's owner, Paul Dacre, denied the allegations, dismissing them as "defamatory" or related to legally barred matters . Unlike previous cases, in which Harry had prevailed by seeking and obtaining compensation and apologies from various tabloids as part of the legal crusade launched in recent years against scandal-mongering and abuses attributed to the popular press, this time the ambition was higher: to obtain a direct conviction of the publisher and a finding of alleged deliberate bad faith in court. For this objective—given the broad protection afforded on paper by British law to freedom of expression by the media—the burden of proof was obviously on the complainants.

(Unioneonline)

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