Even after 3 Days of Cross-examination by a leading barrister for the Mirror group, the Prince has made his point that the likelihood is that his phone was hacked illegally.
HRH Prince Harry alleges that the newspaper group, MGN, which includes the Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, and 8 other national newspapers, engaged in listening in to many of the voice mail messages on his phone.
To put the seriousness of this in perspective, and to show how wide the power of the MGN group to influence the UK reading population is, one needs to be aware that MGN also owns and controls 26 digital online brands, and 119 local and regional newspapers.
Neither Prince Harry nor the MGN group are engaged in criminal proceedings. As the plaintiff, the Prince has brought this civil action in the High Court to try to establish that newspapers use illegal methods to obtain private and confidential information.
The Burden of Proof.
The duty of the trial judge, Mr Justice Fancourt, is to listen to the evidence brought out in court by leading counsel. And the burden of proof of that evidence lies with the plaintiff. It is for Harry to prove that what he claims is actually true.
In his witness statement, the Prince quoted 148 examples where he had reason to believe that the media had, mainly by tapping into his private voice mail messages, used illegal means to obtain information about him. He claimed that much of the information was entirely false, and disclosure could not be justified as being in the public interest.
Andrew Green KC, representing the defendants, MGN Group, choose to cross-examine the Prince only on 33 of the instances which Harry had mentioned in his witness statement. Under court procedure, Harry’s lawyer, Mr David Sherborne KC, s could not force Green to ask questions about the other 115 revealed in the witness statement. We will discuss some of those later, and readers can judge for themselves whether they would have thrown a different light on what actually happened.
The Prince has Support.
Are the media and the Palace working together to discredit Harry, and to suppress the truth about the illegal methods used by newspapers to obtain information? There is evidence that this is happening.
Although many of the YouTube videos, and those who comment on them, are painting Prince Harry as the traitor in the Royal Family, he is actually receiving a lot of support.
His uncle, Earl Spencer, the brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales,