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Reform UK home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf said on social media that former defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace “took out a superinjunction to keep the British people in the dark” over a 2022 data breach and subsequent resettlement scheme affecting thousands of Afghans who had worked with the UK.
Sir Ben approved the Ministry of Defence (MoD) seeking a time-limited injunction to prevent the release of information around the breach that could have put lives at risk if made public.
The judge went further than the MoD had asked and – in the words of a report from MPs – “turned the injunction into a superinjunction”.
The first High Court hearing and the judge’s decision came after Sir Ben stepped down as defence secretary.
The UK had a military presence in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021, and during that time many Afghans worked with the UK Government. These people – and their families – were at risk of reprisals from the Taliban, especially after it retook control of the country following the US’s withdrawal.
As a result, a new way of assessing whether these people should be relocated to the UK was launched in 2021.
The MoD did not have the systems in place to deal with the administration of these efforts so developed them “at pace“.
When an MoD worker sent an Excel file with information on 150 of the applicants to a “trusted third party” outside the Government, they were apparently unaware there was hidden data within the spreadsheet.
This data included “detailed personal information” of more than 18,500 other applicants.
This happened in February 2022, and the mistake was not discovered by the MoD until August 2023.
A judge in the case – Mr Justice Knowles – said in his ruling he had been informed that the secretary of state for defence “personally” took the decision to apply for an injunction on August 25 2023 to stop reporting on the data breach. This was intended to be a time-limited injunction.
The purpose was to “preserve the confidentiality of the personal information for as long as possible” so that the government could do what it could to “help those who might have been put at further risk by the data compromise”.
Mr Justice Knowles added in his reasoning: “The risk in question is to the lives of many individuals and their families, and of torture.”
