The British High court ordered the U.K.’s Mirror Group Newspapers to pay around $180,000 (£140,600) in damages to Prince Harry, found that Harry’s phone was targeted several times between 2003 and 2009, according to the BBC report.
In major legal victory, the court ruled in favour of the Duke of Sussex and held accountable the Mirror Group Newspapers, publisher of Daily Mirror tabloid for hacking his mobile phone multiple times.
It was the long-running battle with the country’s tabloid press.
Justice Timothy, the presiding judge in the case said in a statement that he had awarded Harry the “modest” sum, as the case had shown the Mirror Group “only played a small part in everything that the Duke suffered” and “was not responsible for all the unlawful activity that was directed at the Duke, and that a good deal of the oppressive behaviour of the Press towards the Duke over the years was not unlawful at all.”
Prince Harry has alleged that he was the victim of more than 140 instances of illegal news gathering and the trial tested the evidence regarding 33 of those stories.
The judge said that only 15 out of the 33 articles that were “the product of phone hacking … or the product of other unlawful information gathering”.
“I consider that his phone was only hacked to a modest extent, and that this was probably carefully controlled by certain people at each newspaper,” said Fancourt.
“There was a tendency for the Duke in his evidence to assume that everything published was the product of voicemail interception because phone hacking was rife within Mirror Group at the time. But phone hacking was not the only journalistic tool at the time, and his claims in relation to the other 18 articles did not stand up to careful analysis,” he added.
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