Sawt Falasteen - Prince Harry's battle against Murdoch UK tabloids goes to trial

Harry, King Charles III's youngest son, claims private investigators working for two tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers (NGN) repeatedly targeted him unlawfully more than a decade ago.

It is one of several lawsuits the 40-year-old has pursued against UK newspaper publishers, with the California-based royal winning a phone hacking case against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) just over a year ago.

The High Court claim against NGN does not encompass phone hacking allegations, after judge Timothy Fancourt previously ruled the prince had run out of legal time to pursue that claim.

The only other remaining claimant in the case is Tom Watson, a former deputy leader of the ruling Labour party who now sits in the House of Lords.

The pair accuse The Sun and now-shuttered News of the World of using unlawful newsgathering techniques to generate stories about them more than a decade ago, and that NGN executives deliberately covered up their practices by deleting emails.

Watson also alleges his phone was hacked between 2009 and 2011, when he was investigating Murdoch's tabloids as an MP on a watchdog committee.

- Cover-up claims -

NGN denies all the allegations, calling the cover-up claim "wrong" and "unsustainable".

During the trial -- expected to last up to 10 weeks -- NGN will call "a number of witnesses including technologists, lawyers and senior staff to defeat the claim," a spokesperson said.

Harry, who quit being a working royal in 2020 and settled in the United States with his wife Meghan, has long blamed the paparazzi for the 1997 death of his mother, Princess Diana, in a car chase in Paris.

He is due to give evidence at the trial, to back up claims against the two tabloids covering a 15-year period from 1996.

The prince, whose formal title is the Duke of Sussex, became the first senior British royal to give evidence in a witness box in 2023, when he testified against MGN.

Fancourt, who also presided over that case, eventually ruled in the prince's favour, concluding phone hacking had been "widespread and habitual" at MGN titles in the late 1990s and the duke's phone had been tapped to a "modest extent".

Widespread phone hacking allegations against a number of British tabloids emerged in the late 2000s, prompting the launch of a public inquiry into UK press culture.

NGN apologised at the time for unlawful practices at the News of the World and closed it in 2011, while denying similar claims against The Sun and suggestions of a corporate cover-up.

It has since settled cases brought by some 1,300 claimants.

The publisher has paid out around £1 billion ($1.2 billion) including legal costs, according to British media, and never seen a case go to trial.

- 'Accountability' -

That has prompted criticism that England's civil litigation system favours deep-pocketed defendants who leave claimants with little choice but to settle.

Various high-profile figures who made claims against NGN, including Harry's brother and heir-to-the-throne Prince William and actor Hugh Grant, have settled in recent years.

Grant, a long-time critic of Britain's tabloids, revealed last year he had opted against a trial because it could land him with costs approaching £10 million even if he won.

Under litigation rules, if a claimant refuses a settlement and a judge awards a lower sum after a trial, the claimant must pay both sides' legal costs.

Harry has shown no sign of wanting to settle in a legal battle Fancourt said in an October ruling "at times resembles more an entrenched front in a campaign between two obdurate but well resourced armies".

The British royal told a New York Times event last month that his goal is "accountability".

His battle with an arm of Murdoch's media empire appears highly personal, with Harry describing the 93-year-old mogul as "evil" in his 2023 memoir "Spare".

"I couldn't think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who'd done more damage to our collective sense of reality," he wrote.

J.AbuShaban--SF-PST