A secret the government kept hidden for two years

Shortly after the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, an official working for the Ministry of Defence accidentally leaked the details of 18,700 Afghans who had applied to move to the UK. Many of them had worked alongside British forces and feared being killed by the Taliban in revenge. The government rushed to set up a scheme to resettle in the UK thousands of Afghans endangered by the data leak.

This was all kept a complete secret. The government hid this scandal from the public by obtaining a super-injunction from the High Court in September 2023. This made it a criminal offence to discuss the leak, or even mention the existence of the injunction. 

It was granted to protect Afghans whose lives were put at risk by the data leak. But what was meant to last a few months dragged on for 683 days.

This was unprecedented. Until now, super-injunctions were famously used by footballers trying to hide their affairs from the tabloids. For the first time ever, the British government was granted a super-injunction to conceal information from the public. 

Parliamentary scrutiny was deliberately blocked. The House of Commons is supposed to hold the government to account and examine decisions made by the executive. Yet MPs were not told about the leak so had no opportunity to debate the government's handling of it or the secret resettlement scheme. The Speaker was also told to silence any MP who might breach the injunction in the Commons. 

Even Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, with a statutory duty to scrutinise national security matters, were kept in the dark. This was even though the Justice and Security Act 2013 makes it clear that the sensitivity of material is not a valid reason to withhold information from the Intelligence Committee. Its members are also bound to secrecy by the Official Secrets Act. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that withholding details of the leak from the Committee was a cover-up.

Press freedom was also curtailed. The media were stopped from performing their crucial democratic function of challenging the government's actions and policies. Journalists from outlets including the Independent and Global Media tried to cover the story and were stopped under threat of imprisonment. 

With the press gagged and MPs left clueless, the public had no way of knowing about the data leak or the resettlement scheme. This seriously undermined democratic accountability.

Elections are the public's chance to hold governments to account, but this can only work when the public has access to the truth. At the 2024 General Election, voters were asked to make decisions about public spending, national security and immigration without knowing key facts.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak shocked even his own MPs by unexpectedly calling a general election on the 22nd May 2024. We now know that Mr Justice Chamberlain had originally ruled that the injunction should be discharged on the 21st May 2024.

That this scandal remained hidden during the general election was convenient at best.

The super-injunction was initially sought to protect the Afghans endangered by the data leak, but did it become a useful tool for managing public perception? A memo from October 2024 shows that the Defence Secretary wanted to  "maintain control of the narrative” with "a robust public comms strategy". The memo also reveals that the government was happy to set out the "scale (but not the cause) of the challenge".

The data leak was a matter of public interest. Resettling the affected Afghans is expected to cost £850 million, which is roughly the price of building a new medium-sized hospital. The leak also raised concerns about the Ministry of Defence's competence and security procedures, especially as similar leaks have happened at the Ministry before. A mistake this costly and dangerous should have led to rigorous scrutiny of those responsible.

The data leak was kept secret even from the Afghans whose details were exposed, leaving them with no opportunity to take extra precautions. One Afghan told the BBC that he was left confused as to why the Taliban had intensified efforts to capture his father. 

The courts eventually became uneasy with the super-injunction. Mr Justice Chamberlain, who oversaw the case, ruled that the super-injunction enabled the government to bypass “ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy” and make policy decisions in “a scrutiny vacuum." He decided to lift the super-injunction: the truth is finally out.

But a can of worms has been opened. There's now a precedent for the government to use super-injunctions to hide major scandals from the public. Nothing prevents them from using one to keep the public in the dark again, and Defence Secretary John Healy has refused to rule out doing so.

Next time, a super-injunction could be used for a more sinister purpose. A future government could argue they have national security grounds to hide a scheme to deport large numbers of people. The public would be left clueless until years later.

It’s also possible that another super-injunction is in place right now. We wouldn’t know because super-injunctions are, by design, invisible.

This kind of secrecy is corrosive to public trust. The new British Social Attitudes Survey  showed how little trust the public has in government: 59% said they would ‘almost never’ trust the government to tell the truth in a tight corner.  This scandal seems to vindicate them.

There must now be a public debate about the role of super-injunctions. They may be defensible in exceptional circumstances,  where national security is at risk, but should remain in place for the shortest time possible.

Democratic scrutiny can’t be cast aside lightly. It isn’t an afterthought.  National security concerns must be weighed up against the need for transparency and public trust. People deserve to know what their government is doing and how their money is being spent.

The public is already losing faith in our democracy. Hiding things from them will push them over the edge.