‘The walls are closing in on me’: the hacking of Princess Haya
Eleven court judgments, covering 181 pages, plus hundreds of other pages of legal documents have revealed an extraordinary spying scandal: state-sponsored mobile phone hacking conducted on behalf of the ruler of Dubai against his fearful sixth and former wife, Princess Haya, Britain’s most famous divorce lawyer and her associate, plus three others – against the backdrop of a bitter child protection battle being played out day after day in the English courts.
The conclusion, after just over a year of intense and costly legal arguments, is that “servants or agents” of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, engaged in “the surveillance of the six phones” in Britain using technology supplied by Israel’s NSO Group, a company already embroiled in a string of hacking scandals, apparently to further his cause in the welfare battle.
“The surveillance occurred with the express or implied authority of the father,” writes the judge Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family court, in one key ruling – although the stark conclusion he made was challenged again and again by Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers, trying to argue the court had no right to find against a foreign ruler,
