Court ruling sees Romanian prince win 21-year legal fight for legitimacy

Romania’s highest court has recognised Prince Paul Hohenzollern as the legitimate grandson of former King Carol II, ending a 21-year legal battle.

Paul has claimed he was illegally excluded from the royal family by his uncle, the former King Michael, who was the Romanian monarch twice.

Paul welcomed the ruling yesterday as a matter of “honour for my family”. However, Michael, 90, who was forced to abdicate by the communists in 1947, said the ruling does not give Paul any claims to the throne.

The dispute centres around a love story from more than a century ago, when the heir to Romania’s throne, Prince Carol, who is Michael’s father, secretly married Zizi Lambrino, a Romanian aristocrat. The 1918 marriage was annulled because by law Romania’s heir to the throne was obliged to marry a foreign princess.

From this short-lived liaison, a child was born, Mircea Grigore, who was regarded as an illegitimate son.

Mircea filed a request in a Lisbon court in 1955, demanding to be recognised as Carol’s legitimate son. His request was granted. After communism ended in 1989, a Romanian court recognised the ruling, passed in Lisbon, but Michael appealed it three times.

After his marriage to Zizi Lambrino was dissolved, Carol later married Greece’s Princess Elena, who bore him a son, Michael, Romania’s last king.

He was king from 1927 to 1930, and then from 1940 to 1947. He spent his life in exile in Switzerland and Britain.