A court has banned a French magazine from re-publishing or distributing photographs in France of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing topless.
Closer magazine’s publishers must hand over the original photos within 24 hours or face a daily fine of 10,000 euros (£8,000).
The royal couple’s injunction against publishers Mondadori was granted after the photos were published on Friday.
Royal officials said the couple welcomed the decision.
They said Prince William and Catherine “always believed the law had been broken” and they were entitled to their privacy.
Prosecutors are now considering whether there are grounds for criminal charges.
Reaction ‘disproportionate’
The decision to start a preliminary criminal investigation follows a formal complaint by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, with aides saying they were looking for proceedings against the magazine and the photographer who took the pictures.
The 14 photographs that appeared in Closer were taken while the duchess was sunbathing on a private holiday with her husband at the French chateau of the Queen’s nephew, Lord Linley, in Provence, earlier this month.
The couple says the publication breached their privacy.
Applying for the injunction on Monday, Aurelien Hamelle, the lawyer representing Prince William and Catherine, said the scenes captured were intimate and personal and had no place on the front page of a magazine.
But a lawyer for Closer claimed the royal couple’s reaction was disproportionate.
Delphine Pando said topless photographs were no longer considered shocking and denied the chateau was inaccessible to public view. She also said the magazine did not hold the rights to the pictures.
No British newspaper has printed the pictures.
But Italian magazine Chi – along with Closer, part of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Mondadori media group – printed a special edition on Monday featuring more than 20 pages of the photographs.
Meanwhile, Irish Daily Star editor Michael O’Kane has been suspended while an internal investigation is carried out into the publication of the photographs.
The injunction issued by a court at Nanterre, Paris, does not cover publications outside France.
The royal couple are on the final leg of their nine-day Diamond Jubilee tour of South-east Asia and the South Pacific and are currently on the island of Tuvalu.
