Queen Elizabeth II looks at the coffin of her husband Prince Philip at a funeral at Windsor Castle, UK
By Michael Holden
LONDON (R) It was wrong to hold a secret hearing deciding that the will of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth’s late husband, should be sealed and kept confidential for 90 years, newspaper lawyers told the Londoner on Wednesday court of appeal.
Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, died at Windsor Castle in April last year aged 99 after being married to the Queen for more than seven decades.
In September, Andrew McFarlane, head of the Supreme Court’s Family Division, admitted that he had agreed that Philip’s will should be closed “and that no copies of the will should be entered into the record or kept in court files”.
He said that under a 1910 convention, the death of a king is followed by a request that the will be sealed and hearings and court proceedings kept confidential.
McFarlane said he was the custodian of a safe that contained more than 30 envelopes containing the wills of dead royals.
The Guardian newspaper is appealing the decision to bar the press and public from a hearing on July 28 last year. An earlier hearing that agreed to this exclusion also took place in secret.
The first time the media took notice of the hearings was when McFarlane’s decision was made public two months later.
“A completely private hearing like this is the most serious interference in open justice,” Caoilfhionn Gallagher, a lawyer for the Guardian, told the court, describing the decision as “disproportionate and unjustified”.