Three appeal court judges ruled that the media had no right to attend or be notified of the hearing, adding that publicity would have compromised the need to preserve the Queen’s dignity and her family’s privacy. On Friday, the judges rejected a legal challenge by the Guardian, which had argued that the original decision to block the media undermined the fundamental principle of open justice that requires public access to court proceedings. Last year Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family division of the high court, held a private hearing where he approved a confidential application by lawyers for the royal family to seal Philip’s will. The Windsor family has managed since 1911 to exempt themselves from the provisions of British law that normally require the wills of British citizens to be public. For more than a century, high court judges have held secret hearings and made private applications to keep 33 wills belonging to members of the royal family confidential. The judiciary has never rejected such a request by the Windsors. The Guardian reported that these secret decisions do not allow the public to know how assets worth at least £187 million in today’s prices, described in these sealed wills, have been distributed. In Friday’s ruling, which followed a hearing last week, two appeal court judges – Sir Geoffrey Vos, master of the rolls, and Dame Victoria Sharp, president of Queen’s Bench – said the central issue was whether McFarlane he acted unfairly and unfairly when he barred the media from the hearing last July where he decided to seal Philip’s will for 90 years. Philip died last April at the age of 99. They considered whether MacFarlane could consider an alternative arrangement that would allow journalists to have a “measure of control” over how he had reached his decision. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Vos and Sharp said they had considered the public interest in open justice but decided that “these are exceptional circumstances”, adding: “It is true that the law applies equally to the royal family, but that does not mean that the law produces the same results in all situations’. They said the need for open justice was “adequately served” by MacFarlane’s decision to publish a judgment explaining his decision. “The two crucial things to be protected were … the public interest a) the protection of dignity and b) the protection of the private rights of the sovereign and her immediate family,” they concluded. “The hearing was at an extremely sensitive time for the sovereign and her family, and those interests would not have been protected if protracted hearings had been reported to the press rather than a single instance in which the full reasons for what had been decided were published. .” The judges accepted the Guardian’s claims that the attorney-general was not the only person who could speak in the public interest on a matter of public law, adding that the hearing could also have received submissions from the media. In Friday’s ruling, a third judge, Lady Justice King, agreed that McFarlane was right to exempt the media. However, he also wrote that he should have more creatively thought of alternative ways to allow the media to scrutinize his decision. Norman Baker, a former Lib Dem minister who has also written a book about the royals, said: “This judgment is completely inappropriate in a country that is supposed to be a modern democracy. It is a false argument that the sealing of Philip’s will is necessary to preserve the dignity of the crown. “Dignity is earned, not a right. And dignity is earned by not behaving in an undignified manner, by not applying a blanket of secrecy to what should be open.”
