Afghan leak: Judge decries ‘scrutiny vacuum' as he lifts gag order — live

Times

14 hours ago

The Ministry of Defence feared that if knowledge of the dataset became public then the Taliban would find it and be able to start working through what one activist described as a 'kill list'.
Conservative ministers secured a superinjunction in the High Court on September 1, 2023, which prevented anyone reporting the incident or that a court order even existed. When Labour came to power in July 2024 they continued to argue it should remain in place and it was not until January this year that John Healey, the defence secretary, ordered a review of the policy.
Afghans who were on the 'kill list' were not told that their lives may be at risk despite concerns the Taliban could suddenly come into possession of the list.
At about 10am on Thursday January 25, 2024, I called a senior member of the Ministry of Defence press office, whom I had known for years, to tell them I was aware of a data leak. It had put lives at risk and it was the subject of a superinjunction, I said.
I told him I had known about the matters for some time and wanted to join the court proceedings. I did not realise at the time that everything I said during that initial phone call would be written down and submitted to the High Court. It would form part of a 1,568-page bundle of evidence documenting the longest ever superinjunction and the only to be sought by a government.
I had no idea of the magnitude of what I was dealing with.
• Read in full: Our defence editor recounts being silenced by government
Tens of thousands of Afghans have begun receiving an email from the UK government telling them their data has been breached. In the email, seen by The Times, they are warned their information was sent outside 'secure systems' and may have been 'compromised'. 'We understand this news may be concerning,' it says.
The email urges the Afghans to 'exercise caution and not take phone calls or respond to messages or emails from unknown contacts'. It also urges Afghans not to travel to third countries without a valid passport and visa.
'If you do so, you will be putting yourself at risk on the journey, and you may face the risk of being deported back to Afghanistan,' it says. One activist told The Times her phone was 'blowing up' with messages from concerned Afghans.
Alarm bells rang in the summer of 2023 when an activist helping Afghans who had served with UK forces during the war reached out to a defence minister.
It was 9.57am on Tuesday, August 15. 'Person A', as she later became known in court documents, was panicking.
She had become aware of a massive data breach involving tens of thousands of Afghans. What the government did next — and how quickly — was a matter of life and death.
• Read in full: MoD evacuates Afghans — without them knowing why
Successive governments had tried to stop the public and parliament from knowing about the data breach in the Ministry of Defence, which it had said put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of torture and death.
The Afghans, some of whom had served alongside UK forces during the war, had applied for sanctuary in the UK because of fears they could be targeted by the Taliban.
But a database containing their confidential information, including their contact details and names of their family members was sent by a British soldier to Afghans already in the UK who then passed it on to individuals in Afghanistan. One of those who received the dataset threatened to post its contents in a Facebook group 18 months later.
The British military is responsible for a data leak that put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of death — and successive governments have spent years fighting to keep it secret using an unprecedented superinjunction.
UK government officials were left exposed when in February 2022 a soldier inadvertently sent a list of tens of thousands of names to Afghans as he tried to help verify applications for sanctuary in Britain.
• Read in full: 'Kill list' sent in error leads to £7bn cover-up
The longest ever superinjunction and the first to have been secured by the government has been lifted in the High Court after nearly two years and a lengthy legal battle spearheaded by The Times.
Mr Justice Chamberlain said the 'long-running and unprecedented' order, which stopped the world from knowing about a data breach concerning Afghans applying to come to Britain, had given rise to 'serious free speech concerns' and had left a 'scrutiny vacuum'.
Handing down his judgment at midday on Tuesday, he said the gagging order had the effect of 'completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy'. The superinjunction was in place for 683 days.