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Harry loses High Court case against publisher

2026-07-07 22:15:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

The Duke of Sussex and six others have lost their privacy case in the High Court against the publisher of the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail.

Judge Nicklin said the plaintiffs had failed to prove the allegations of illegal information gathering.

Prince Harry filed a lawsuit against Associated Newspapers, along with a number of well-known figures.

They alleged that the newspaper group used illegal methods to obtain information for the articles, allegations which were vehemently denied by Associated Newspapers.

In a joint statement after the verdict, Prince Harry and Baroness Doreen Lawrence, another claimant and peer whose son, Stephen, was murdered in 1993, said: "We came to the Court seeking justice and accountability. But we have received neither."

"It's a complete and visible whiteout, but unfortunately not entirely unexpected," the couple added.

A spokesman for the publisher described the decision as a "huge victory for the Daily Mail and its journalists".

The prince did not answer BBC questions about the court ruling as he left an Invictus Games event in London.

In a summary of his decision, Judge Nicklin concluded that the allegations were serious and therefore required more convincing evidence before they could be proven.

He said the seven plaintiffs could not rely on “suspicions, even when that was understandable.” Instead, he said they had to prove that the information was obtained illegally.

Judge Nicklin declined to rule on whether what became known as unlawful information gathering had become “widespread and customary” at Associated Newspapers and instead ruled on the merits of each individual claim.

He said he accepted the denials of Associated Newspaper journalists "who provided legitimate explanations for the source of the controversial articles and incidents."

He ruled that the plaintiffs had also failed to prove that three senior Associated executives - former editors Paul Dacre and Peter Wright, and the publisher's current senior lawyer Elizabeth Hartley - had lied in their evidence before the Leveson Inquiry, where they said there was no illegal activity at the Daily Mail and Sunday Mail.

In his full 436-page decision, Judge Nicklin examined each alleged privacy violation and often noted that there were doubts about how the information was obtained by the journalists.

In an article, the Daily Mail's royal editor wrote in 2013 that Prince Harry faced a lonely New Year's Eve without his girlfriend Cressida Bonas.