England and Wales High Court (Family Division) Decisions

IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
FAMILY DIVISION
(In open court)

		Royal Courts of Justice Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
		12 April 2017

This judgment was handed down in open court

Sir James Munby, President of the Family Division :

1. I have before me, as President of the Family Division, another application by Malika Benmusa. I struck out a previous application on 14 March 2017: Re Benmusa [2017] EWHC 494 (Fam). This application is dated 20 March 2017 and was received by the court on 23 March 2017.
2. This application, like the previous one, seeks "To apply to unseal the will of the late Princess Margaret." The only difference is that, on this occasion, the application which, like the previous one, I am invited to deal with "without a hearing" is accompanied by a closely-spaced one page statement by the applicant dated 20 March 2017 and a copy of a death certificate of a woman, who was born in 1904 and died in 1997 and who, according to the applicant, was "my late Aunt."
3. I do not propose to set out the entire contents of the applicant's statement. Its flavour can be judged by the opening part (again I set it out as written):

"I MISS MALIKA BENMUSA, am the last child of the late princess Margret … I was born in Scotland. My mother married my father a year before I was born, then separated, but never divorced. I do not wish to give out my father id as he is a very well know. […] My mother was very frightened of her so called family, and felt I needed protection. I am the heir to the throne of England. This is why so much trouble has been taken to cover up my identity. I believe between the age of three years old I was raised by my mother older sister, not known to the public, due to my grandparents' not been married, and because of the war at the time. When I was three years old I believe my mother was frightened by her own family member to give me up for adoption, my mother did not consent to this. They frightened her saying that she was a drunk and my father was a drug addict. And my mother was told to remove me from the care of her older sister who real name was [name as on death certificate] […] Last address was before she passed [address as on death certificate]. The Kings Georges oldest daughter."

In charity to the applicant I quote no more.

4. The application is self-evidently complete nonsense It is a matter of public record, of which I can take judicial notice, that the father of her late Royal Highness Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was his late Majesty King George VI, who was born on 14 December 1895, and that her mother was her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who was born on 4 August 1900. They married on 26 April 1923. Quite obviously a woman born in 1904 could not have been, as the applicant asserts, her mother's elder sister if, as she also asserts, her mother was HRH Princess Margaret. I have no hesitation in concluding that I should strike out the applicant's claim, as I do. It is a farrago of delusional nonsense.