British newspaper The Guardian, Queen II, who died on April 9, 2021. Elizabeth’s wife is trying to defend the public’s right to know the contents of Prince Philip’s will in court. The broadcast’s appeal hearings began this week in London. The Guardian is appealing against the decision to shut the Duke of Edinburgh’s last will from the press in September 2021, which decided to keep the last will for 90 years.
The hearings started on Wednesday, July 19th. On the first day of the hearing, King Counselor Kaolifion Gallagher, representing The Guardian side, sought the wrong decision not to inform the press about the upcoming court hearing regarding Prince Philip’s will. In this way, he declared that the principle of open justice was violated.
“These were completely private, closed sessions with no access to accredited journalists or any possibility for third-party observation. “Such completely closed hearings are a very serious interference with the open justice process,” he said.
It also noted that Judge Andrew Macfarlane, who decided not to disclose the will of the Duke of Edinburgh, made an “extraordinary move” for not allowing the press and the public to assess how reasonable his decision was.
Royal family lawyers and Attorney General Sir James Eady, who ruled last September that the contents of Prince Philip’s will will not be disclosed to the current generation, oppose the Guardian.
On the second day of the hearing, Sir James Easyy said that closing the September hearing to the press was a decision that did not harm the public interest. In court, he said “the principle of clear justice is not immutable” and stressed that The Guardian did not claim that Judge MacFarlane made the decision to protect the dignity of the royal family and their right to privacy.
The Attorney General added that a distinction must be made between the personal income of a member of the royal family and the budget for his care replenished from the state treasury. According to him, the amounts that parliament allocates annually may be the subject of public hearings, but not the size of Prince Philip’s own fortune.
“[Председатель суда] He drew clear conclusions about what the public interest was based on, and in this context the commercial advantage for the press, and separated it from the real, real public interest in the legal sense.
The extent of Prince Philip’s fortune is not really known, but The Guardian has calculated how much money was withheld from the public during the years when members of the royal family kept their wills from the public. The fact is that they have not been made public since 1911 – during this time, as a result of closed hearings, at the request of the queen’s lawyers, 33 wills of the British royal family were closed. At the same time, according to the laws of Great Britain, the last will of any citizen can be made public.
The Guardian estimates a total of £187m left behind by members of the royal family, including distant relatives of the monarchs.
The publication made these conclusions based on data on the size of their wealth – although this could only be partially filled from the inheritance they received so that the estate could be transferred from one will to another.
The richest member of the royal family in the last 110 years was Alexander William George, Duke of Fife, who died in 1912. The husband of Princess Louise, daughter of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, left behind the modern equivalent of £79.7 million. He is pursued by Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret. £11.5 million today; Queen Victoria’s daughter, Louise of Great Britain, who died in 1939, Duchess of Argyll (£9.3 million); Queen Queen Mary of Teck, Elizabeth’s grandmother, who left £7.9m behind in 1953; Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, uncle of Prince Philip and last Governor of India who died in 1980 (£7.6m); Lady Patricia Ramsay, granddaughter of Queen Victoria (died in 1974 with a fortune of £7 million).
Meanwhile, the status of two deceased members of the royal family – Prince Philip and Queen Anne Elizabeth, who died in 2002 – is kept secret, so the Guardian did not include the total amount.
Source: Gazeta
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