Prince Harry receives good news from UK ahead of meeting with King Charles
Prince Harry has received a good news from London amid his legal battle with News Group Newspapers (NGN) as the High Court rejected an application to delay a trial.
The Duke of Sussex has won the latest round in his legal battle with the publisher after the court insisted the trial should go ahead as planned next January.
It comes days before Harry’s return to the UK in May to attend his Invictus Game’s event. He is expected to hold crucial meeting with his cancer-stricken dad King Charles and other senior royals in Britain.
NGN had applied to push back the trial for alleged unlawful information gathering in order to allow the court to determine whether the claims, by King Charles III’s younger son Harry and 41 others, were brought too late.
Justice Fancourt said that to do so would likely push the full trial back another two years, incurring significant extra cost in what has already proved to be “very expensive litigation”.
“I consider there are too few advantages at this stage to abandoning the orderly preparation of a trial on all issues to instead have a trial on only one issue,” he told the court.
He said the January 2025 trial date had been set in November 2022 and that NGN had left it too late to raise an objection.
“It would be quite a serious thing to overturn at such a late stage,” he said, noting that all existing parties had “been working for years” on the case. The judge said a large amount of preparation had already been done “at considerable expense” with a view to all issues being tried in 2025.
