The British government imposed a two-year superinjunction to prevent the public, and even Parliament, from learning that the Ministry of Defence had accidentally leaked the personal data of 25,000 Afghans linked to UK forces, triggering a covert £6 billion resettlement scheme that has relocated over 16,000 people so far, with thousands more expected to follow.
The gag order, which was lifted on Tuesday, banned any mention of the breach, or of the injunction itself, while ministers quietly rehoused thousands of Afghans in military accommodation and hotels without any prior public consultation. Judges were told disclosure risked Taliban reprisals and civil unrest in the UK. But the High Court has now ruled that the secrecy created a “scrutiny vacuum”, silencing political and public debate on one of the largest relocation efforts in British history.
The breach occurred in February 2022, when a Royal Marine mistakenly circulated a spreadsheet containing names, contact details and other personal information of 25,000 Afghans who had applied for relocation to the UK under two government schemes: the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP) and the Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme (ACRS). Many of the applicants were former soldiers or interpreters who had worked alongside British forces and were considered at risk of Taliban reprisals.
The Ministry of Defence only learnt of the breach in August 2023, after a member of the public – understood to be a support worker for Afghans settling in the UK – emailed MPs warning that the spreadsheet had been shared widely online. “I have a copy of it, so does the Taliban – why doesn’t the ARAP team?” they wrote, in an email dated 10 August 2023 to Luke Pollard, the Labour MP for Plymouth, and James Heappey, then a Conservative defence minister. Less than a week later, extracts from the dataset were posted on Facebook.
Within days, the previous Conservative government secured a rare superinjunction – granted contra mundum, or “against the world” – prohibiting the disclosure not just of the data breach itself, but of the very existence of the injunction. The order was repeatedly renewed in closed hearings before finally being discharged this week. Throughout that period, ministers resisted calls for transparency, arguing that public reporting could jeopardise lives abroad and provoke unrest at home.
Behind the scenes, the government launched an emergency relocation scheme, known as the Afghanistan Response Route, which has already brought 16,000 Afghans affected by the breach to the UK. Thousands more are in transit. At one point, 20 per cent of all Ministry of Defence accommodation was being used to house arrivals, according to court documents. The total cost of the resettlement effort is estimated at £5.5 and £6 billion over five years. Of that, £400 million has already been spent and a further £850 million allocated specifically to respond to the data breach.
Mr Justice Chamberlain, who presided over the case, expressed concern about the implications for free expression. In a judgment now made public, he wrote that the superinjunction “completely shut down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy”, and created what he described as a “scrutiny vacuum”.
He later concluded that the injunction involved a “serious interference” with Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to freedom of expression and includes the corollary right of the public to receive information. While such rights can be restricted in the interests of national security or the protection of life, courts are required to assess whether such restrictions are both necessary and proportionate.
That threshold, he found, was no longer met after an independent review, commissioned by the Ministry of Defence, concluded that the leaked dataset was unlikely to increase the risk of Taliban reprisals. The report, by a former civil servant, found no evidence of a systematic campaign of retaliation based on the data, and noted that the Taliban already possessed extensive biometric and personnel records inherited from the former Afghan government. As such, the judge found that the leak was unlikely to “substantially change an individual’s existing exposure”, undermining the legal and evidential basis for continued secrecy.
Throughout the injunction period, government departments were privately warned of the risk of civil unrest if the breach became public.
A Whitehall briefing note circulated on 4 July 2025, seen by the Telegraph, advised officials to “mitigate any risk of public disorder following the discharge of the injunction”, and flagged the potential for tensions to rise during the summer months. Ministers were said to be concerned that the secrecy surrounding the Afghan arrivals, some of whom were rehoused in areas already experiencing pressure on housing and public services, could provoke a repeat of the anti-immigration riots that erupted in July 2024 following a mass stabbing in Southport. According to the same reporting, another briefing paper circulated to Cabinet ministers two months after the unrest said the riot hotspots were largely in places where there had been a high number of Afghan arrivals.
The ARAP scheme was closed to new applicants in early July 2025, just days before Mr Justice Chamberlain ordered that the superinjunction be lifted on 15 July. While the judgment does not comment on the timing, some insiders have suggested the decision was intended to pre-empt a surge in applications once the breach entered the public domain.
There’s more on this story here.
