By Michael Holden and Sam Tobin
LONDON (Reuters) -The publisher of the Daily Mail tabloid on Wednesday sought to limit the scope of a lawsuit brought by Prince Harry and other high-profile figures over alleged unlawful behaviour, saying it must be restricted to specific cases of wrongdoing.
Harry, the younger son of King Charles, and six others including singer Elton John accuse Associated Newspapers (ANL) of serious privacy breaches dating back 30 years.
ANL, which also publishes the Mail on Sunday and the MailOnline, denies any wrongdoing and says the "lurid" claims are preposterous.
TRIAL DUE NEXT YEAR
A trial is due to take place early next year, but on Wednesday the publisher said the claimants' lawyers had failed to comply with a previous court ruling which said they should stick to specific allegations of wrongdoing by named journalists or private investigators acting for them.
ANL also said specific elements of the claimants' case should be thrown out, such as generic arguments which they said relied on decisions in previous litigation against other media organisations, and which the judge, Matthew Nicklin, had already ruled should not be included.
ANL's lawyer Antony White told the court that lawyers for Harry and the others were either being "tin-eared" or openly defiant.
The lawsuits should even be struck out unless the claimants provided information about when and how they became aware they might have a viable claim, White argued.
"ANL contends that the breaches are sufficiently flagrant and serious that unless now complied with and remedied (the) claims should face the draconian sanction of being dismissed," the publisher's lawyers said in court filings.
HARRY'S LAWYERS SAY FULL CASE SHOULD CONTINUE
Harry's lawyers said in court filings that such a "nuclear option" was unjustified. They also said the generic case was "a critical and fundamental component" of the lawsuit.
The seven claimants - who include actors Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost and Elton John's husband David Furnish - accuse ANL of activities such as hacking their voicemails, burglary, and obtaining their medical records by deception.
Both Frost and Furnish were in court for Wednesday's hearings. Harry was listening in remotely.
The litigation is the first time ANL has been dragged into the phone-hacking scandal, which began almost 20 years ago, leading to a public inquiry into the ethics of the press, several criminal trials and an admission by some papers that they unlawfully targeted thousands of victims.
Over the last six years, Harry, the Duke of Sussex, has been engaged in open warfare with British tabloids, accusing senior editors of authorising unlawful intrusions into people's public lives, destroying friendships and relationships.
He also blames the press for the death of his mother Princess Diana, who was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 as her vehicle sped away from chasing paparazzi photographers.
Harry has twice sued ANL for libel, winning one case and withdrawing the other, while his wife Meghan has also won a privacy lawsuit against the publisher. He has also successfully sued Mirror Group Newspapers while Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers settled a claim ahead of a trial.
(Reporting by Michael Holden; Editing by Alison Williams)
