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Tuesday saw the The European Court of Human Rights reject Monaco’s Princess Caroline’s lawsuit of a German magazine that published photos of her and husband Prince Ernst August of Hanover in 2002. This ruling is being seen as giving support to the European media’s right to report on celebrities.
 Click here for photos of the Princess The photos were taken while the couple were on skiing trip as Caroline’s father, the late Prince Rainier III, was growing ever more ill. The Princess cited that the magazine, Frau im Spiegel, violated hers and her family’s privacy during the difficult time by publishing the photos alongside a story about the ailing Monegasque ruler.
A German court had initially cited that the media had the right to report on the Monegasque royals “reconciled their obligations of family solidarity with the legitimate needs of their private life.” That was when Princess Caroline and Prince Ernst August took their case to the ECHR in 2008.
The European Court, based in Strasbourg, France, cited Caroline and her lawyers “had not provided any evidence that the photos had been taken in a climate of general harassment, as they had alleged, or that they had been taken secretly.”
“The photo, in the context of the article, did at least to some degree contribute to a debate of general interest,” the European court said in a statement. “The German courts characterization of Prince Rainier’s illness as an event of contemporary society could not be considered unreasonable.”
The Court noted that the Princess has sought privacy for her and her family for many years. In June 2004, she got the ECHR to condemn the German publication of photos of her at the Monte Carlo Beach Club. The court said her rights were violated under Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights.
This ruling could also harm Caroline’s daughter, Charlotte Casiraghi’s chances of winning her lawsuit against the paparazzi, which she filed for last month.
Sources: BBC, New York Times, Wikipedia
 Click here for more photos of Charlotte Casiraghi Charlotte Casiraghi, the eldest daughter of Monaco’s Princess Caroline, has filed a lawsuit against the paparazzi, citing they regularly intrude on her personal life.
Her lawyer, Alain Toucas, says his client goes through”daily hell” and is “pursued relentlessly day and night by dozens of individuals and/or photographers.”
Toucas, who calls Ms. Casiraghi a Princess even though she is not one, compares her to the late Princess Diana, who was hounded daily up until her 1997 death.
25 year old Charlotte, who is a show jumper, recently made headlines when she broke up with Alex Dellal, her boyfriend of several years and began dating French actor Gad Elmaleh.
Her mother, Princess Caroline, won a landmark suit against the paparazzi in 2004 when the European Court of Human Rights granted her right to privacy.
Sources: AFP, ¡Hola! Magazine, Wikipedia
Iñaki Urdangarin, the son-in-law of Spain’s King Juan Carlos, is due to appear before a judge in early February because of his alleged ties to a corruption scandal.
 Click here for related photos at Daylife.com Urdangarin, known as the Duke of Palma and married to Infanta Cristina, is being investigated for abusing public funds he received on behalf of a non-profit organization he ran between 2004 and 2006. But the exact accusations have not yet been revealed.
The AFP is reporting that the King forced the Duke to step down from Instituto Noos in 2006.
“(The King) ordered him to stand down from his activities and he sold his shares,” said an official, who works at the royal palace’s press office.
“He was told he shouldn’t work for himself and it would be better if he worked overseas.”
Iñaki now works for Telefonica, a telecommunications company, and is based in Washington, DC.
In addition this week, the Spanish royal family exposed their budget on their website.
King Juan Carlos is paid €292,752 annually by the state and pays 40% tax on his income.
The heir to the throne, Prince Felipe, gets €146,376. Queen Sofia and the three princesses – Infantas Elena, Cristina and Princess Letizia – get €375,000 each. The total budget for the royal family was €8.4 million this year.
The royal palace denies the family were obligated to reveal their finances and insist the royals did so for the sake of modernization.
Sources: BBC, AFP
A 61 year old Thai man has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for sending text messages that insulted and threatened Queen Sirikit.
 Click here for more photos Ampol Tangnoppakul was found guilty for four counts of Thailand’s lese-majeste laws and computer crime law, five years sentence for each. He had sent them in 2010 to the secretary of then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.
The messages “indicated intent to harm and defamation against Her Majesty that would trigger hatred,” the court said. “All the messages were untrue.”
Tangnoppakul denied the charges and claimed he was unfamiliar with text messaging. He is a retired truck driver and lives with his wife, daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in the outskirts of Bangkok. He has mouth cancer and has been treated for it since 2007.
Thailand’s lese-majeste laws are among the toughest in the world. There has been a noticeable surge in people being charged with defaming the Thai royals in recent years.
Sources: Bloomberg, Telegraph
A Spanish judge is probing a former non-profit firm once run by the husband of Infanta Cristina. The Instituto Noos, which Iñaki Urdangarin was once president of, is being investigated for allegedly using public funds from the Balearic Islands’ regional government.
 Click here for more images The money – €2.3 million – is suspected to have been padded to the local governments and then the extra money was used to fund firms run by Urdangarin.
The funds were given to Instituto Noos to organize the Balearic Islands Forum, a conference on tourism and sports, which happened in 2005 and 2006 – during when Urdangarin was president of Noos. Sources say it is inevitable that he would be asked to explain the high invoices given to regional governments.
“Even if we accept them all as real, they don’t even begin to justify the amount of money received,” said sources from the Anticorruption Attorney’s Office. The Office suspects many of these invoices are either exaggerated or fake.
It also suspected that the “set prices that were completely disproportionate to the services it rendered to public agencies, and after receiving the public funds, it pretended to hire fictitious services from companies [...] controlled by Diego Torres and Iñaki Urdangarin.” Torres is a business partner of Urdangarin.
The Royal Palace has not yet commented on the allegations, but sources admit, “something must be said” as this investigation does affect the royal family.
Sources: AFP, El Pais, Monarquia Confidencial
 Click here to view images of Prince Albert II A man is serving a six day sentence in Monaco for insulting the tiny principality’s ruler Prince Albert II.
The man, believed to be named Hicham from the French town of Beausoleil, entered Monaco around midnight on Tuesday, already intoxicated. He entered a bar and tried to order more drinks but was refused because of his drunk state.
Enraged, the man began to insult the people in the bar. When police were called and they began to arrest him, the man then insulted the police and also Prince Albert II.
Facing a three year sentence under Monaco’s penal code article 58 – or lese-majeste as it is commonly known – the man had his sentence reduced to six days after telling a Monegasque court that he had no recollection of that night and he held the Prince in high regard.
As ancient as the lese-majeste law sounds, according to the British newspaper, Daily Mail, it is enforced not only in Monaco, but also Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Greece and Spain.
Thailand is perhaps most famous for its lese-majeste – French for “injured monarch” – laws. Over there, one can face up to fifteen years for insulting the Thai royals.
Source: Nice Matin, Daily Mail
This weekend, Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal released several documents to the media which refute allegations that he raped a young model aboard his yacht docked in Ibiza, Spain in August 2008. Last week, a Spanish court re-opened the case which was originally closed due to a lack of evidence.
 View more images of Prince Alwaleed at Daylife.com The documents Prince Alwaleed’s private office sent to Royalty in the News include a scan of his passport, which is marked for France in August 2008, and scans of yacht navigation logs, again showing Alwaleed’s yacht, Kingdom 5-KR, was not ever docked in Spain during that time.
The Prince’s private office also released statement from Heba Fatani, the Sr Executive Manager of the Corporate Communications department of Kingdom Holding Company. Fatani is quoted as saying Alwaleed was with his wife, Princess Ameerah, and daughter, Princess Reem, at the time and was also surrounded by French security while being in multiple public places in France.
In addition, Fatani says, “While the Prince is a committed advocate for women and has empathy for any assault victim, he was simply not present” in Ibiza as the alleged victim claims.
Also speaking out is Alwaleed’s wife, Princess Ameerah. According to the AFP, she has said this about the rape allegations:
“I was with my husband outside of Spain the day these allegations took place in Ibiza.”
“Quite simply we were not there. We were together in the French city of Cannes. I was with him all the time, and we were with at least 30 people,” she said.
“Hundreds of witnesses can confirm that we were in Cannes, just as there are dozens of proofs that we were not in Ibiza in 2008.”
The reason why this case has been reopened is because a provincial court overturned the ruling to close the case, and an Ibiza court wanted to formally request assistance from the Saudi authorities to take a statement.
Source: AFP, Private Office of HRH Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
A court in Spain is once again looking into allegations that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal raped a young model aboard a yacht three years ago off Ibiza. The case was originally closed due to lack of evidence, but its been reopened after a Balearic Island provincial court overruled the decision.
 Click for original photo at Daylife.com According to the model, who’s name has not been released, she was with Prince Alwaleed – the nephew of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and one of the world’s richest men – at a Ibiza nightclub, but blacked out at one point. She then woke up in the bedroom of his luxury yacht with the Prince on top of her.
“I didn’t drink much, but I think there was something in my glass,” she said in an SMS text message at 5:12am August 13 2008, according to witness Benedicto Moreno Venecia.
The Prince strongly denies the allegations.
“These allegations are completely and utterly false. The alleged encounter simply never happened. Indeed, the events could not have happened,” said the statement published on Alwaleed’s Kingdom Holding Company website. “Neither His Royal Highness nor his lawyers were informed or aware of any complaint filed in Ibiza in 2008 or that the same complaint was dismissed in 2010.”
“Not only was Prince Alwaleed not in Ibiza at any time in 2008 but has not been in Ibiza for over a decade. Further Prince Alwaleed’s yacht, Kingdom 5KR was not in Ibiza in 2008 nor has Prince Alwaleed ever charted a yacht in Ibiza,” the statement goes on.
Alwaleed “was nowhere near Ibiza when the alleged events took place. As relevant travel records and itinerary confirm, he was in the presence of dozens of people at that time, including his family, and not in Spain.”
Kingdom Holding Company spokeswoman Heba Fatani added that “there have been many examples of people impersonating Prince Alwaleed over the Internet and elsewhere for their own purposes.”
However, according to Spain’s National Toxicology Institute, traces of semen was found in the model’s genital area and there was nordazepam, metronidazol and caffeine in her urine, after she filed the complaint the next day.
As of now, the court has requested Saudi Arabian authorities “to take a statement from the accused,” the spokeswoman said in an email. But the request “has not been completed yet because the judge has given a deadline to the parties to formulate in writing the questions they want to raise,” the spokeswoman said.
The model’s lawyer, Javiet Beloqui wants Prince Alwaleed to provide a DNA sample to compare it to the semen found on his client.
“If he is innocent, it is all over and if not, he will be charged with rape,” Beloqui said. “It is as simple as that.”
Sources: AFP, AP
Monegasque royal newlyweds are suing the French magazine L’Express for publishing stories “incorrect facts about their private life” in the days leading up to their wedding earlier this month.
 Click here for more pics The magazine published stories on its website, saying Charlene Wittstock – now Her Serene Highness Princess Charlene – tried to flee Monaco a few days before her lavish nuptials. She supposedly learned that Prince Albert II might have fathered another child out of wedlock.
According to L’Express, Charlene’s passport was confiscated by officials when she tried to board a one way flight to her home of South Africa.
Although the reports were rejected by the Prince and many high ranking officials in Monaco, they were picked up by numerous news outlets.
Even on the day of her civil wedding, Charlene denied the rumors, claiming that it was nothing but “vicious gossip and empty rumours”.
“It’s all lies,” she said to Vogue magazine.
Her father, Michael Wittstock, has denied the stories. “I am so disappointed that people believe in this nonsense,” he said.
The reason for the lawsuit is because, as the couple claimed, the magazine “gave credibility to these unfounded rumors by publishing them. “
On the day of their religious ceremony, however, the Palace admitted that Prince Albert was to undergo a paternity test. Whether that test actually took place is not yet known.
Source: Sky News, Independent (South Africa), Royal News Examiner
He may royalty, but Prince Laurent was treated like any other Belgian citizen Wednesday when he was stripped of his driver’s license for two weeks due to speeding.
 Mark Renders/Getty Images/FILE Laurent, age 47, was caught driving 30 km (19 miles) above the speed limit in downtown Brussels Monday afternoon. A speed camera captured his Fiat Punto Abarth speeding by at 82 km (51 miles) per hour on a 50 kph (31 mph) street.
“He was clearly driving too fast,” palace spokesman Pierre Emmanuel de Bauw said.
This is the third time the Prince had his license suspended. The first time came in 1987, and in 2001, it happened again when he went 137 kph (85mph) in Bruges.
He also caused controversy once by saying that there should be “a special license for those driving a fast car”.
Source: AFP, The Telegraph
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