Legal challenge to Diana evidence

The ruling by coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker allowed the inquest to continue after the French government decided not to force the photographers, who pursued Diana to the scene of her death, to give evidence by video link from Paris.

The French decision, despite high-level calls from London for a rethink, threatened to prevent the jury hearing any evidence from the crucial paparazzi witnesses. But Michael Beloff QC argued that, while the move to have their statements read out may have been "convenient", the coroner had no power to admit them in the way he was proposing.

Lawyers for Mr al Fayed - whose son Dodi died in the crash which killed Diana in 1997 - his Ritz Hotel in Paris and the family of his former employee driver Henri Paul, all objected at the inquest to transcripts of the paparazzi interviews and other potentially-controversial written evidence being read out without a challenge.

Mr Beloff, appearing for the Ritz, is now asking two High Court judges to quash the coroner's decision - made on November 7 in the fifth week of the inquest - and declare he has gone wrong in law.

The QC told Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Aikens at London's High Court the position in law was "crystal clear". The coroner's freedom to admit documentary evidence had been circumscribed, while it remained unfettered as regards oral evidence. The single route by which it could be admitted was Rule 37 of the 1984 Coroners Rules.

The rule did not permit the coroner to admit evidence from a witness who was able but unwilling to attend the inquest if "an interested person" - in this case Mr al Fayed, the Ritz and the Paul family - objected to such evidence being read to the jury without challenge.

Alternatively, a coroner reading such evidence to a jury must immediately afterwards put before the jury "relevant questions" the interested persons would have put to them had they attended, argued Mr Beloff. He said the coroner "had no power merely to have the documents read out" and he had failed to meet the Rule 37 criteria.

He said the application for judicial review involved the proper construction of the Coroners rules and had important implications for the proper functioning of the inquest system generally. It was potentially of importance for inquests into other deaths abroad, including "friendly fire" or other military deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lord Justice Scott Baker has conceded that the rule concerned was "far from clear". But he announced the evidence could nevertheless be admitted under established law.