Paris: Closer’s publishing company, will be fined €10,000 (Dh48,170) per day if it publishes any more photographs following Tuesday’s judgment or transmits them to any third party via email or any other means. Mondadori, owned by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, will also have to pay €2,000 towards legal fees.
A French court opened a separate criminal investigation on Tuesday into charges that Closer and a photographer breached the privacy of the duke and duchess by publishing the topless photos.
If found guilty, the magazine could be fined up to €45,000 and the editor could be jailed for up to a year.
The court in Nanterre, near Paris, said it would investigate whether there are grounds for criminal charges.
In granting the injunction, the French judge has sided with the royal couple, whose lawyer told him on Monday the photos portrayed the “profoundly intimate life of the couple” and asked: “In what name did this magazine publish these shocking photos ... It was certainly not in the name of information. This has no place on the cover of a magazine or even in an article in a magazine.”
Their lawyer had argued in court that the photographs were a breach of the French privacy laws and were “a shocking breach of their personal intimacy”.
The legal action, while not the first taken by a member of the royal family against a newspaper or magazine, was seen as a bid to put down a marker and prevent any further invasion of theduchess’s privacy.
But one senior executive at a British celebrity magazine said: “I think the action has been taken while the horse is already half way round the field.”
On Saturday a second publication, the Irish Daily Star, published the photos, leading to the editor being suspended on Monday night pending the outcome of an internal investigation.
And on Monday, an Italian celebrity magazine, Chi, rushed out a special edition with 26 pages devoted to the candid photos of the future Queen.
When Closer published the photos on Friday, St James’s Palace roundly condemned the move as a “grotesque” invasion of the duke and duchess’s privacy “reminiscent of the worst excesses of worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana, Princess of Wales”.
Closer’s editor, Laurence Pieau, defended the decision to print the photos and said she did not think the photos were “shocking” or “degrading”.
She said she thought the reaction had been “disproportionate” and that all they had tried to do was show a young couple in love.
The pictures were taken while the duke and duchess were staying in Provence at a chateau owned by Lord Linley, the Queen’s nephew.
The couple, who are currently visiting parts of southeast Asia and the South Pacific for a diamond jubilee tour, were told about the pictures just ahead of a stop at a mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
