Prince Harry and other celebrities lose privacy claims against Daily Mail publisher in London High Court ruling

A London judge ruled on Tuesday that Prince Harry and a group of other celebrities had failed to prove their privacy claims against the publisher of the Daily Mail, finding that the claimants had not established that journalists at the newspaper used unlawfully-gathered information to obtain their stories. The judgment represents a significant victory for the publisher in a case that had been closely watched as a test of the limits of press privacy law in England and Wales. The claimants alleged that journalists had obtained private information through unlawful means, a claim that echoes the broader phone-hacking and unlawful information-gathering litigation that has occupied English courts for much of the last decade. The ruling underscores the high evidentiary bar claimants face in establishing not just that private information was published, but that it was obtained through unlawful means. No details of the specific evidence considered, the legal framework applied, or the named celebrities beyond Prince Harry were disclosed in the available sources. No legal advisers or law firms were named in the sources.