Prince Harry Steps Down from African Parks Board After Human Rights Scandal

Prince Harry has stepped down from the board of African Parks, the wildlife charity that admitted human rights abuses by its rangers in the Republic of the Congo.

A spokesperson for the Duke of Sussex confirmed on 24 August 2026 that he was no longer a trustee of the organisation, The Guardian reported. African Parks, founded 26 years ago, manages more than 20 million hectares across Africa in partnership with 13 governments and hundreds of local communities.

The departure closes a chapter that began in July 2016, when Harry supported one of the largest elephant translocations in history in Malawi. He served as president of African Parks for six years before joining its board of directors in 2023 — a ten-year commitment the charity acknowledged with what it called "deep gratitude."

The backdrop to the departure is grave. In January 2024, the Mail on Sunday published a report in which members of the Baka community accused African Parks rangers of beating, waterboarding and raping local people to prevent them accessing their ancestral forests. The alleged abuses took place in Odzala-Kokoua national park in the Republic of the Congo, which African Parks manages.

African Parks commissioned an independent review. Last year it published a statement acknowledging that human rights abuses had occurred at the park and said it had improved its safeguarding processes both there and across the organisation.

Survival International, a charity campaigning for Indigenous peoples' rights, had publicly called on Prince Harry to step down from the board. The Baka are an Indigenous group whose traditional forest lands overlap with conservation zones in central Africa — a tension that has drawn international scrutiny to the practice of "fortress conservation," where local people are excluded from areas designated for wildlife protection.

Harry's name still appeared on African Parks' "Our People" page as a board member at the time of writing, and the charity does not appear to have published a statement on its own domain announcing his departure. The charity's online profile describes him as "a humanitarian, military veteran, mental wellness advocate, and environmentalist."

The announcement arrives as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are reported to be relocating from California to the UK with their children. It also follows a separate dispute involving Sentebale, the charity Harry co-founded with Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, which sued him for defamation in April 2026 after both patrons and trustees departed amid a governance breakdown.

What gives the African Parks story its weight is the sequence: a charity patronised by a senior royal, an independent inquiry confirming abuse, a campaign for his resignation, and then — quietly, via a spokesperson rather than a formal statement — his departure. The machinery of how a trustee leaves matters less here than the record of what was found while he was there.