Prince Harry was due Wednesday to take the stand at a court in London as the first witness called in his joint claim that two UK tabloid newspapers unlawfully gathered information about him.
On the third day of a highly-anticipated nine-week trial Harry will testify against Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL), the publisher of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, alleging illegal privacy breaches.
Brought alongside six other high-profile figures, including pop icon Elton John and his husband David Furnish, it is the prince's last active legal case in his long-running crusade against the British media.
He is scheduled to begin giving evidence at the High Court in London at 11:30 am (1130 GMT).
Harry made history in 2023 by becoming the first senior British royal to enter the witness box in more than a century, when he testified in his successful hacking claim against Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN).
Last year, on the eve of another scheduled trial, Rupert Murdoch's UK tabloid publisher agreed to pay him "substantial damages" for privacy breaches, including phone hacking.
In the ANL case, the seven well-known figures -- including actors Liz Hurley and Sadie Frost -- accuse the publisher of illegally intercepting voicemail messages, listening in on phone calls and deceptively obtaining private information.
They allege it paid private investigators implicated in other phone-hacking lawsuits for some of the unlawful information used to generate dozens of stories.
The accusations cover a period from at least 1993 to 2018 in some instances.
ANL has consistently denied the claims, calling them "lurid" and "preposterous".
- 'Paranoid' -
King Charles III's younger son has long railed against media intrusion, blamed paparazzi for the death of his mother Princess Diana, killed in a Paris car crash in 1997 while trying to shake them off.
Ahead of his evidence session Wednesday, he sat in the High Court on Monday and during some of Tuesday's proceedings.
Hurley and Frost, who joined him, are also set to give evidence along with all the other claimants.
Campaigner Doreen Lawrence -- whose son Stephen was murdered in a 1993 racist attack -- and ex-politician Simon Hughes are the other two.
David Sherborne, representing the seven, told the High Court he will show "there was clear and systematic use of unlawful gathering of information" at ANL.
He added in opening arguments that it "knew they had skeletons in their closet" and that years of "emphatic denials were not true".
In written testimony unveiled Monday, Harry said ANL's alleged conduct had left him "paranoid beyond belief" while John said his family felt "violated".
But Antony White, ANL's lawyer, countered Tuesday that the trial will show that it has "provided an explanation through a long series of witnesses of the sourcing by its journalists of the 50-plus articles" concerned.
"Overall, it provides a compelling account of a pattern of legitimate sourcing of articles," he added.
The allegations around payments to private investigators were "clutching at straws in the wind", White added.