Meghan Markle wins new round of privacy legal battle in UK: What you need to know

picture courtesy: Reuters

Meghan Markle on Thursday won the latest round of her legal battle over privacy against the publishers of the ‘Mail on Sunday’ newspaper as a UK court turned down an appeal against a previous ruling in her favour, welcomed by the Duchess of Sussex as setting an important “precedent”.

Markle had sued Associated Newspapers for the publication of five articles reproducing parts of the "personal and private" letter she sent to her father Thomas Markle in 2018.

The Court of Appeal judges rejected the Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) attempt to have a trial over its publication of extracts from Markle’s letter to her father, which the judges concluded was “personal, private and not matters of legitimate public interest”.

Earlier this year, a UK High Court judge had already ruled in favour of the Duchess in the privacy and copyright case and rejected the need for a full trial. Now, that decision has been upheld.

Referring to the decision made earlier in the year, the court said: “The judge had correctly decided that, whilst it might have been proportionate to publish a very small part of the letter for that purpose, it was not necessary to publish half the contents of the letter as ANL had done.”

The 40-year-old, now based in the US with Harry and her two young children Archie and Lilibet, claimed that from “day one”, she had treated the lawsuit as an “important measure of right versus wrong” while the newspaper group had “treated it as a game with no rules”.

“In the nearly three years since this began, I have been patient in the face of deception, intimidation, and calculated attacks, she said.