Meghan Markle Brussels Speech Cancelled as 50 Children’s Lock Screens Reach Parliament

Fifty phones go on display in the European Parliament today, each lit with the face of a child who died after something happened to them online. The woman who was meant to open the memorial with her husband will not speak.

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, withdrew on Monday from the joint keynote she and Prince Harry were to deliver at the opening of the Lost Screen Memorial in Brussels, four days after her father’s arrest. The Meghan Markle Brussels speech was the centrepiece of the morning until then, a shared slot of 15 to 20 minutes, and Harry will now deliver it alone. A source told the Telegraph she was “just not strong enough, emotionally, to be doing any public speaking right now.” She will still travel to Brussels. She will walk through the memorial with Harry and sit in the room while he speaks. He will also join a panel called Beyond Promises: Building A Digital Future That Works For Children.

The memorial is 50 illuminated lightboxes shaped like smartphones. Each one shows the lock screen photo of a child whose life was cut short by digital dangers. The parents supplied the pictures. The parents are members of the Archewell Foundation Parents’ Network, and the images were their own — the pictures they once saw every time they picked up their phones. A virtual version carries each child’s story in the family’s own words, with voice messages recorded by the parents. The installation was unveiled in New York in April 2025, travelled to Geneva in May, and opens in Brussels today at the invitation of Antonio Lopez-Isturiz, the Spanish MEP who is first vice-chair of the Parliament’s Child Rights Intergroup. The Parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, opens the morning.

In Geneva, the director-general of the World Health Organization read five of the names aloud before Meghan spoke. “The names behind us are not statistics. They’re children,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. “Alexander. Coco. Riley. Archie. Selena.” At the unveiling in New York, the parents described what it was to see the screens. Amy Neville, who lost her son Alexander, told HuffPost that coming around the corner and seeing it was “a touch overwhelming, and that’s probably where I cried the most.” Her son is cremated, she said, and the family has no place to visit him: going to his lightbox felt “kind of like visiting the gravesite.” Joanna Bogard, who lost her son Mason, said having something to look at and touch was “such a gift.” Tammy Rodriguez, whose daughter Selena is on one of the screens, said the girl “always loved the city” — and now “she’s right in the middle, and she’s overlooking it.”

One of the speakers expected in Brussels today is a Belgian mother whose son died at 15 in 2017, after an intimate photo of him was shared online. The details match Glenn, the boy at the centre of a Belgian campaign that turned his own phone into a petition. He was 15 when he took a nude photograph of himself and sent it in confidence; when the picture appeared online, he took his own life. In November 2023, Child Focus, the Belgian centre for missing and sexually exploited children, reactivated his number. Callers heard Glenn’s voicemail and signed a petition by leaving their names after the tone. More than 25,000 signed in a single day. The Belgian parliament passed a resolution unanimously, and the country got its first commissioner for children’s online safety. The campaign’s own figures say one in four Belgian young people aged 15 to 25 have had intimate images shared without their consent. Glenn’s old number logged 37,274 missed calls before Child Focus turned it into a permanent helpline.

On 17 September, the European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act, a single set of rules for the whole Union. It sets a minimum age of 15 for a social media account of one’s own, no social media access for under-13s, and guardian-run mini-accounts for 13- and 14-year-olds capped at an hour a day. It also bans the design tricks that keep children scrolling: infinite feeds, artificial notifications, reward features. Providers would have to verify a user’s age when an account opens, and prove their services are safe rather than wait to be caught. The Commission’s own evidence for the proposal says one in four children encounter harmful content online, one in four experience sexual solicitation before 18, and pressure to share intimate pictures affects one in ten teenagers. The Commission has already used the Digital Services Act against ByteDance and Meta over addictive design and weak age checks, and against X after its Grok chatbot generated child sexual abuse material. The separate permanent law on detecting abuse material is still being negotiated, with the next round of talks reported for 8 December, and a temporary regime runs until April 2028. Public feedback on the KIDS Act proposal is open until 3 December.

The network behind the memorial has changed hands since the last time it was in front of cameras. The Archewell Foundation has transferred the Parents’ Network — its systems, its processes, its brand and creative assets — to ParentsTogether, a nonprofit, with a cash grant to cover the first year. The couple are expected to stay involved in some capacity, but no formal decision about their role has been made. The network began in 2022 as a community of American families who had lost a child to social media or whose children had been harmed by it. The memorial is still Archewell’s creation. The network of families behind it now belongs to someone else.

Thomas Markle Sr., 82, was arrested in Florida on 6 November. The charge: one count of possession of child pornography. He faces up to 20 years in federal prison if convicted, entered no plea, and was released on his own recognizance. His arraignment will take place in California on a date that has not been set. Meghan said in a statement on 23 October that she was “deeply distressed” by the allegations against her father and that her thoughts were “with any children who may have been harmed.” She added that her distance from her father had been “for one reason: to protect them” — her children. The couple returned to Britain in late August after six years in the United States, and Brussels is their first joint appearance abroad since then. Their only joint outing since the return was a visit to charities in Nottingham on 15 October.

Online, the first replies under the news posts split between sympathy and accusation, and none of them mentioned the memorial. “Leave her alone. She’s done nothing wrong,” cthom1961 wrote on Threads. “Meghan love, rest easy – there are plenty of us who love you,” progressivefemme wrote on the same platform, sending love from Australia. The critics read the withdrawal as a verdict on her: “Good job as it would be so hypocritical of her seeing what her dad has gotten up to with children,” louloumangar wrote. Another supporter, obrien4509, told her the decision was the right one and that most people thought she and Harry were “very brave.” The row is about whether she may speak for children at all. The parents in the room talk about something else: the screens, the lock photos, and the laws they want.