Prince Harry has lost his second appeal to have taxpayer-funded security while he and his family are in the UK.
The news comes more than a year after he lost his original legal battle, and 13 months after he lost his first appeal in April 2024.
While the royal claimed that he had been “singled out” for “inferior treatment”, and the safety of he and his family were “at stake”, three senior judges at the Court of Appeal ruled against him.
“Having studied the detailed documents, I could not say the duke’s sense of grievance translated into a legal argument for a challenge to Ravec’s decision,” Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls, said in a statement.
Buckingham Palace also commented on the matter: “All of these issues have been examined repeatedly and meticulously by the courts, with the same conclusion reached on each occasion.”
Shortly after the court ruling, Prince Harry revealed in a candid on-camera interview with the BBC that he was “devastated” by the result, and would not be seeking a further legal challenge, which he said proved “that there was no way to win this through the courts.”
“I can’t see a world in which I would bring my children back to the UK at this point.”
“I love my country, I always have done, despite what some people in that country have done…and I think that it’s really quite sad that I won’t be able to show my children my homeland.”
He added that he never asked his father to intervene in the case, but simply “step out of the way and ask the experts to do their jobs.”
In February 2024, High Court judge Peter Lane upheld the decision to downgrade Prince Harry’s security – a decision made in 2020 by the U.K. government and the Executive Committee for the Protection of Royalty and Public Figures (RAVEC).
“The court has found that there has not been any unlawfulness in reaching the decision of 28 February 2020,” said Lane on February 28th that year, as per PEOPLE, adding that the “decision was not irrational” nor “marred by procedural unfairness”.
Lane continued: “The court has also found that there has been no unlawfulness on the part of RAVEC in respect of its arrangements for certain of the claimant’s visits to Great Britain.”
In response to this, a legal spokesman for the prince said that the duke was “not asking for preferential treatment, but for a fair and lawful application of RAVEC’s own rules.”
After Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped back as senior royals in 2020, U.K. authorities stripped away their right to certain security measures.
The Duke of Sussex then argued that he and his family were entitled to automatic protection when travelling from their Californian home to the U.K.
A legal spokesperson told PEOPLE at the time that the 40-year-old was not seeking “preferential treatment”, merely the “same consideration as others”.
“The Duke’s case is that the so-called ‘bespoke process’ that applies to him is no substitute for that risk analysis,” the statement said, adding that Prince Harry hopes to obtain justice through the appeal, and will make no further comment while the case is ongoing.
In December 2023, the duke told the High Court he needed security to keep his family safe, particularly given his “experiences in life”.
“The U.K. is central to the heritage of my children and a place I want them to feel at home as much as where they live at the moment in the United States,” he said at the time
The father-of-two continued: “That cannot happen if there is no possibility to keep them safe when they are on U.K. soil.”
“I can’t put my wife in danger like that, and given my experiences in life, I’m reluctant to unnecessarily put myself in harm’s way too.”
The February court hearing also confirmed that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were “recklessly” pursued by paparazzi while in New York in 2023.
Judge Lane revealed that, after an investigation of the chase, local police found that paparazzi exhibited “persistently dangerous and unacceptable behaviour”.
Archie and Lilibet have not returned to their ancestral homeland since their great-grandmother’s Diamond Jubilee in February 2022, while their mother has not returned since the Queen’s funeral in September of that same year.
