A SWEDISH PRINCESS has ignited controversy in her home country by claiming royal privilege to get out of a traffic fine – an immunity she does not actually have.
Princess Madeleine, the daughter of King Carl Gustav, was pulled over by traffic police in central Stockholm yesterday after being caught driving a royal car in a bus lane.
Having been pulled over by a policeman, 30-year-old Madeleine – who is due to get married on Saturday – controversially claimed royal immunity, arguing that the police apprehend criminals on behalf of the royal family.
This is untrue, however. Sweden operates a similar system to Britain, where all public prosecutions are made on behalf of the Crown – meaning that any criminal case is dealt with in the British courts, for example, as R. v Defendant (where R. stands for ‘Rex’ or ‘Regina’, the Latin words for king and queen).
This means that the monarch themselves cannot be prosecuted, as they would be both the prosecutor and the defendant – but the same protection does not apply to other members of a royal family.
Swedisn paper Aftonbladet quoted the acting head of Stockholm’s metropolitan police as saying the police officer had been confused as to whether the princess did actually enjoy immunity from prosecution – and that she was therefore mistakenly allowed to proceed.
There was also some confusion about whether cars belonging to the royal court were allowed to travel in designated bus lanes, but it was later determined that no such exemption exists.
The police chief, Lars Lindholm, told the paper that as the princess did not enjoy any immunity, she would now be issued with a fine of 1,000 kroner (€116).
The paper also reported that Madeleine has a history of driving infractions – recalling that in 2003, the princess drove down a pedestrian-only street, ignoring seven prohibition signs, to buy an envelope in a stationery shop.
A few years later it was revealed she had accumulated five different fines or tickets for parking too close to pedestrian crossings and for leaving a car facing the wrong direction on one-way streets.
Madeleine, the youngest of the three children of King Carl XVI Gustav and Queen Silvia, will marry her boyfriend of three years, New York-based British financier Christopher O’Neill, on Saturday.
She was previously engaged to lawyer Jonas Bergstrom, and had been due to marry him in the second half of 2010, but the wedding was postponed after Madeleine’s sister Victoria arranged her own wedding for June 2010. The relationship later broke down entirely with Madeleine moving to New York where she met O’Neill.
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