LONDON — A major breach of data on Afghans applying to resettle in the U.K. has been revealed after a two-year court order was lifted Tuesday.
In February 2022, a defense official inadvertently leaked names and contact details of 18,714 Afghans as he verified applications for people seeking sanctuary in Britain.
They had applied for the U.K.’s Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, which was set up in August 2021 after the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan following the United States’ withdrawal.
The previous Conservative government first became aware of the data leak in August 2023, when details of nine individuals were made available online.
The then-government applied to the High Court for an injunction to prevent the data loss becoming public.
In September 2023, the High Court granted a super-injunction, which prevented disclosing even the existence of the injunction. The government then established a separate and confidential Afghan Response Route in April 2024 which 4,500 Afghans have made use of and is estimated to cost £400 million.
‘Unprecedented’
Defence Secretary John Healey updated the House of Commons about the breach Tuesday, and said he was closing this route after the “unprecedented” super-injunction was lifted by the court.
Healey said “ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the data set.”
But the defence secretary admitted “it has been deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting” to the Commons and said he was “deeply concerned about the lack of transparency.”
High Court Judge Martin Chamberlain lifted the order Tuesday, saying it was “fundamentally objectionable for decisions that affect the lives and safety of thousands of human beings, and involve the commitment of billions of pounds of public money, to be taken in circumstances where they are completely insulated from public debate.”
Chamberlain had already lifted the super-injunction in May 2024, before the Conservative government successfully appealed before last year’s election. The High Court judge said the ruling had “given rise to serious free speech concerns” and created “scrutiny vacuum.’”
A report into the breach by former Ministry of Defence civil servant Paul Rimmer said there was “little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against former officials” and said data the Taliban inherited from the previous Afghan government would already enable them to target individuals.
Tory defense spokesperson James Cartlidge welcomed the apology on behalf of the British state Tuesday. He said the leak “should never have happened and was an unacceptable breach of all relevant data protocols.”
And Cartlidge sought to defend the previous government’s record on transparency, arguing that “when this breach came to light, the immediate priority of the then-government was to avoid a very specific and terrible scenario, namely, an error by an official of the British state leading to torture or even murder of persons in the dataset at the hands of what remains a brutal Taliban regime.”
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