![]() ![]() In response Sherborne read extracts from statements made by a number of claimants, including from Baroness Lawrence, the mother of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence. Which evidence could have provided the basis of a complaint at an earlier date, the judge asked, and which evidence was new and, as he put it, ‘triggered it over into a worthwhile claim’? He none the less engaged in a detailed presentation of the claimants’ cases and the nature of the evidence involved, and in this he faced numerous interventions from the judge, who pressed him on timings. ![]() With Prince Harry once again in the courtroom watching, counsel for the claimants, David Sherborne, who several times described Associated’s bid to have the case thrown out untried as ‘ambitious and unattractive’, complained that Associated’s approach to the hearing demanded the discussion of many issues which properly belonged in the trial itself. ![]() Where the claimants now said that particular articles published about them in Mail papers give rise to the inference that illegal measures had been used, he said, nothing had prevented them drawing those inferences and taking legal action in a more timely fashion.Īs an argument it may carry weight in law, but it seemed at times to come close to being an assertion from the Mail’s representative in court that ‘You shouldn’t have believed our denials.’ While reminding the court that Associated denied all the allegations against it, he took the judge through a catalogue of evidence, some of it from as long ago as the early 2000s, which he said might reasonably have given the claimants grounds to sue at a far earlier date.Įven as senior Associated executives told the Leveson Inquiry of 2011-12 that they had conducted internal investigations and knew for certain there had been no voicemail hacking, Mr Beltrami pointed out, the claimants – some of whom have already sued other papers for hacking – might have paid attention to numerous published claims and insinuations that Mail and Mail on Sunday journalists had broken the law. Responding to the claimants’ assertion that they were only able to bring the case once there was enough evidence to do so, counsel for Associated, Adrian Beltrami KC, found himself insisting at some length that they had grounds to be suspicious of his client years and years ago. The prince, Sir Elton John, Baroness Doreen Lawrence and four others accuse the newspapers of breaching their rights, mainly by the use of private investigators who employed unlawful methods and mainly in the years between 20, while the owners of the Mail, Associated Newspapers, assert (among other things) that the courts should not entertain their claims because they were made outside the usual six-year time limit. The judge, Mr Justice Nicklin, reserved judgment, meaning it will probably be a few weeks before he delivers his decisions about the Mail group’s applications to have the claims either thrown out or eventually reduced in scope. The four day High Court hearing about the phone hacking and privacy intrusion claims against the Daily Mail group by Prince Harry and others ended yesterday in the world of the hypothetical and even the surreal. ![]()
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