Prince Harry has been awarded significant damages after London’s High Court ruled he had been the victim of phone-hacking and other unlawful acts by journalists on newspapers in the United Kingdom with the knowledge of their editors.

The prince became the first senior British royal for 130 years to give evidence in court when he appeared as the star witness at a trial in June against Mirror Group Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, who he said had targeted him for 15 years.

The judge’s decision to award him 140,600 pounds ($267,400) and his conclusion that the papers’ editors and executives knew about the wrongdoing will be seen as a major victory for the prince.

Harry called for the authorities and the police to take action against those identified as having broken the law.

“Today is a great day for truth as well as accountability,” he said in a statement read by his lawyer David Sherborne.

The Duke of Sussex was one of about 100 claimants – including actors, sports stars, celebrities and people who simply had a connection to high-profile figures – who have taken legal action over allegations of phone-hacking and unlawful information-gathering between 1991 and 2011.

Harry and three others were chosen as test cases and the trial considered 33 articles of about 140 he alleged were the result of unlawful behaviour over 15 years from 1996.

“I found that 15 out of the 33 articles that were tried were the product of phone hacking of his mobile phone or the mobile phones of his associates, or the product of other unlawful information gathering,” Judge Timothy Fancourt said.

“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.”

The judge concluded there had been widespread hacking and unlawful activities from 1996 until 2011, even carrying on while a public inquiry into illicit practices at UK newspapers was taking place.

However he said nearly all those on the board of the company, owned by Reach, had been kept in the dark.

“We welcome today’s judgment that gives the business the necessary clarity to move forward from events that took place many years ago,” an MGN spokesperson said.

“Where historical wrongdoing took place, we apologise unreservedly, have taken full responsibility and paid appropriate compensation.”

The judgment was damning on the involvement of senior editors and executives, saying they were fully aware of what was going on.

Among those was high-profile broadcaster Piers Morgan, who has become a vocal critic of Harry and his US wife Meghan.

“The court has found that Mirror Group’s principal board directors, their legal department, senior executives, and editors such as Piers Morgan, clearly knew about or were involved in these illegal activities,” Harry’s statement said.

“Between them, they even went as far as lying under oath to parliament, during the Leveson Inquiry, to the Stock Exchange, and to us all ever since.”

Ex-editor bites back

Piers Morgan, who now works for News Corp and has often publicly criticised Harry and wife Meghan, said after the ruling he has “never hacked a phone or asked anybody else to hack a phone, and nobody has produced any actual evidence to prove that I did.”

He said the court had found that just one article published under his editorship may have been gathered unlawfully.

“I wasn’t called as a witness – it’s important for people to know this – by either side in the case. Nor was I asked to provide any statement. I would have very happily agreed to do either or both of those things had I been asked. Nor did I have a single conversation with any of the Mirror Group lawyers throughout the entire legal process,” the presenter said.

Morgan went on to accuse the Duke of being “ruthless, greedy and hypocritical” and claim he has been “repeatedly exposed in recent years as someone who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped him around his California-tanned face.”

Omid Scobie, co-author of Finding Freedom, an unofficial 2020 biography of Harry and Meghan, gave evidence that Morgan was “reassured” over a 2002 story about singer Kylie Minogue and her then partner James Gooding after being told it had come from voicemail interception.

Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, questioned Scobie about his motives in giving evidence in support of Harry’s case.

But Fancourt said in his written ruling on Friday that Scobie was “a straightforward and reliable witness”.

“I accept what he said about Mr Morgan’s involvement in the Minogue/Gooding story,” the judge added.

‘Compelling evidence’

“No evidence was called by MGN to contradict it.”

Fancourt also said in his ruling that there is “compelling evidence that the editors of each newspaper knew very well that (voicemail interception) was being used extensively and habitually and that they were happy to take the benefits of it”.

The judge said editors were also happy to take the benefits of “connected and related” unlawful information gathering by MGN journalists and private investigators.

Sly Bailey – chief executive of MGN’s then-parent company Trinity Mirror, now known as Reach, between 2003 and 2012 – was also found to have known about the habitual use of phone-hacking and other unlawful information gathering.

Bailey gave evidence in May that she had “no knowledge of these activities” and that revelations of unlawful acts were “a matter of great regret”.

However, Fancourt found that Bailey and Paul Vickers, Trinity Mirror’s group legal director until 2014, “knew about – or, which amounts to the same thing, turned a blind eye to – the extensive and habitual” unlawful information gathering at MGN.

—with AAP