Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has asked the High Court to quash the search warrants used when police arrested him in February and searched two royal properties.
The judiciary’s press office confirmed on October 5 that the claim “concerns an application by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor for a judicial review to quash search warrants issued by a judge at the Central Criminal Court on February 18, 2026.”
It is a judicial review of the warrants, not a criminal case against officers.
A private hearing on October 8, listed for 2pm before Mr Justice Hilliard, will deal with an application by Thames Valley Police to restrict access to the papers.
Thames Valley Police told the BBC it was “engaged in legal proceedings in relation to warrants previously obtained from the Central Criminal Court” and would not comment further while the case was live.
UK newspaper The Telegraph reported that permission for the review had been granted by a High Court judge.
The warrants covered Marsh Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, eastern England, and Royal Lodge at Windsor, his former home west of London.
Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on February 19, his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office, a common law offence in England and Wales that carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Pictures of the arrest went around the world.
The suspicion arose from material in the American Epstein files.
He was taken to Aylsham police station, in Norfolk, and released the same day under investigation, after about 11 hours in custody.
Detectives spent several days at both properties and removed documents and other items.
He has denied wrongdoing.
He is no longer Prince Andrew or Duke of York. The titles were removed over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, after Buckingham Palace said on October 30, 2025 that the King had begun the formal process of stripping his style, titles and honours and that he would leave Royal Lodge.
If the warrants are quashed, material seized under them could be ruled inadmissible.
The court has not yet heard the substance of the challenge, and the criminal investigation remains open.
The allegations behind the arrest are drawn from the January 2026 US Epstein-file release, a tranche of more than three million pages published by the US Department of Justice on January 30 under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
It is suspected that in 2010, while he was the UK’s special representative for trade, a post he had held since 2001, he forwarded confidential government material to Epstein.
Emails attributed to him appear to pass on visit reports from Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shenzhen within minutes of receiving them from a palace adviser, identified in the files as his special adviser Amir Patel, and a confidential brief on investment opportunities in Helmand, southern Afghanistan, forwarded on Christmas Eve 2010.
Government guidance states that the duty of confidentiality owed by trade envoys continues to apply after their term of office ends.
He has not been charged and denies wrongdoing.
That inquiry is separate from the claims of Virginia Giuffre, who said she was trafficked to him and sexually abused three times from the age of 17, in London, New York and on Epstein’s island in the US Virgin Islands.
He denied meeting her, including in his 2019 Newsnight interview.
She sued in 2021. The case was settled in 2022 for an undisclosed sum with no admission of liability. She died in 2025.
The files show a long association: Andrew stayed at Epstein’s properties, flew on his aircraft, kept up a correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of sex trafficking in 2021 and sentenced to 20 years the following year, and in 2010, after Epstein’s 2008 Florida conviction, was photographed with him in Central Park and is said to have hosted him at Buckingham Palace.
He stepped down as trade envoy in 2011 and from royal duties in 2019.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Duke of York and brother to King Charles III, was arrested at his residence on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk. https://t.co/KOzkjyUzgh
— Brussels Signal (@brusselssignal) February 19, 2026
