Prince Harry’s “life is at stake,” his lawyer warned in a London courtroom on the final day of an appeal on Wednesday, regarding his security detail in the country.
“One mustn’t forget the human dimension to this case. There is a person sitting behind me whose safety, whose security and whose life is at stake,” the Duke of Sussex’s attorney, Shaheed Fatima, said at the Royal Courts of Justice in an appeal over Britain’s Home Office decision against giving the royal the highest level of security protection when he is in the United Kingdom, according to The Independent.
She continued, “There’s a person sitting behind me who’s been told he’s getting a special bespoke process when he knows and has experienced a process that is manifestly inferior.”
In February of last year, the 40-year-old lost a legal challenge over the government’s decision to take away his automatic right to high-level police protection after he stepped down as a senior royal in 2020.
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The Home Office committee had ruled there was “no basis for publicly funded security support for the duke and duchess within Great Britain.”
In February 2024, a High Court ruled that a government panel’s decision to provide Harry with “bespoke” security on an as-needed basis was not unlawful, irrational or unjustified.
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His lawyer said Harry’s attendance in court “is a potent illustration of how much this appeal means to him and his family.” The royal rarely appears at his court proceedings.
On Tuesday, his lawyers told the court that Harry and his wife Meghan Markle “felt forced to step back from the role of full-time official working members of The Royal Family as they considered they were not being protected by the institution,” Sky News reported.
His lawyers added that he and Markle wanted to continue “their duties in support of the late Queen as privately funded members of The Royal Family.”
Harry and Markle’s situation “does not appear to have been discussed at any formal RAVEC [Royal and VIP Executive Committee] meeting,” his lawyers said this week, noting that instead it followed a “bespoke” process in a meeting at Buckingham Palace in January 2020.
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“(Harry) does not accept that ‘bespoke’ means ‘better,’” Fatima added, according to Sky News. “In fact, in his submission, it means that he has been singled out for different, unjustified and inferior treatment.”
A government lawyer this week said that Harry’s appeal was based on an “inappropriate, formalist interpretation” of the government’s review of his security.
“The appeal is fairly to be characterized in the same way,” government lawyer James Eadie said on Tuesday. “It involves a continued failure to see the wood for the trees, advancing propositions available only by reading small parts of the evidence, and now the judgment, out of context and ignoring the totality of the picture.”
A written decision on the matter is expected later.
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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex left England in 2020, two years after their wedding at Windsor, and eventually settled in Montecito, California, with their two children, Prince Archie, 5, and Princess Lilibet, 3.
Harry’s final day in court for his appeal also coincidentally comes on his father, King Charles II’s, twentieth wedding anniversary with Queen Camilla.
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Charles and Camilla left for a state visit to Italy a day after Harry arrived in the U.K. for his court proceedings, and royal podcaster Kinsey Schofield confirmed to Fox News Digital that the two didn’t meet before Charles left the country.
Fox News Digital’s Stephanie Nolasco and Ashley Papa and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
