Lawyers seek to use ECHR to force UK into accepting thousands more Afghans

Telegraph

2 days ago

Lawyers are seeking to use human rights laws to force the Government to bring tens of thousands of Afghans to the UK after their names were leaked by a British soldier.
Up to 100,000 people could claim against the Government, arguing that their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) have been breached because they are in danger of reprisals from the Taliban.
A planned judicial review will argue that the Ministry of Defence's argument for closing the resettlement scheme for affected Afghans is false, and that anyone on the list of Afghans who helped British forces is at risk of death.
However, MoD insiders say that for every genuine claimant on the list, 15 are bogus.
Ministers already face a compensation bill of up to £1bn from those on the list, which the media was gagged from reporting until a super-injunction was lifted on Tuesday.
Sean Humber, a partner at the firm Leigh Day, told The Telegraph: 'We are looking at possible legal avenues for judicial challenge for people who have been denied relocation and are now finding themselves on the list.
'They are now at an increased risk. As well as the compensation, it's a case of whether the Government should now take action.'
Rejected applicants could be allowed in
Lawyers are now set to argue that anyone on the list could be eligible for resettlement in the UK, even if they had no connection to Britain and their claim for resettlement was spurious.
If successful, the judicial review could set a precedent to allow Afghans on the list who had been rejected for resettlement to come to Britain anyway.
The legal basis for the challenge will be that the Rimmer review, which was commissioned to look at the scandal by Labour last year, wrongly concluded that the risk to Afghans on the list was low.
It will argue that people whose names were leaked now face a threat to their human rights under article 2 and article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The articles give claimants a right to life and a right to freedom from degrading treatment or punishment, which lawyers could argue is at risk from the Taliban because of the British Government's mistake.
Hermer would be called on to defend Government
Any claims against the Government under the ECHR would ultimately be defended by Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, who has been accused of asserting the primacy of human rights law over British government and politics.
The Labour peer previously represented Afghan families affected by alleged extrajudicial killings by the British military during the war. He has changed official guidance to instruct government lawyers to treat international law and domestic legislation equally.
The spreadsheet, which was leaked by a Royal Marine in 2022, contained the names of 25,000 Afghans who had applied for resettlement in the UK because they had worked with British forces during the war in Afghanistan.
Ministers have admitted that when families and other dependents are included, the true number of people affected is likely to be between 80,000 and 100,000.
Around 6,900 of the Afghans on the list have either travelled to the UK or are in transit, but most were rejected for resettlement under either the original scheme or a new emergency plan to rescue those in danger because of the leak.
Further legal restrictions on the data leak were lifted on Thursday, revealing that the identities of British special forces and MI6 operatives were also on the list.
Johnny Mercer, the former defence minister, said it was 'gut-wrenching' to learn that their names 'may have fallen into [Taliban] hands'.
However, The Telegraph has been told that the vast majority of claimants on the list were illegitimate.
The admission raises fresh questions about whether bogus claimants slipped through the net and came to Britain under the secret scheme.
Other officials, including one whistleblower who spoke to this newspaper, said the vetting of people on the scheme was poor.
'We simply cannot accommodate more Afghans'
Danny Kruger, a Conservative MP who has raised concerns about the number of Afghans resettled in the UK, said any immigration decisions after the leak should be 'for the Government, not the courts'.
'Our communities simply cannot accommodate more Afghans, especially those who have been refused access to this country already,' he said.
'The result of this blunder by the MoD must not be further mass immigration driven by human rights lawyers.'
Allowing tens of thousands more Afghans to enter the UK would frustrate Labour's attempt to end the use of asylum hotels by the end of the decade – a pledge that is already under extreme pressure from small boat crossings.
The Telegraph revealed this week that Suella Braverman, the Conservative former home secretary, had been prepared to announce that asylum hotels would no longer be used but was forced to continue using them because of the resettled Afghans.
Mrs Braverman was one of several Cabinet ministers who raised objections over the plan to secretly airlift thousands of Afghans to the UK.
In a critical statement on Wednesday, she said: 'The state apparatus thinks it can hide its failures behind legal technicalities while ordinary people pay the price'.
Despite legal restrictions being lifted, The Telegraph remains banned from reporting extra details around parliamentary statements about the breach, made by ministers and senior opposition frontbenchers alike.
Along with other news outlets that challenged the super-injunction, this newspaper also remains prohibited from reporting what the MoD's internal risk assessments about the breach said at various points over the past two years.
According to the Rimmer review into the leak, conducted by Paul Rimmer, the former deputy head of Defence Intelligence, the risk to the individuals named is now low enough for news of the leak to be published.
Yet the public is not allowed to examine why – or how – Mr Rimmer's conclusion was so different from that of full-time professionals inside the MoD under the Conservatives.
One defence official under the previous government said it was unclear how Mr Rimmer had been able to conclude that the Taliban would not seek reprisals against Afghans on the list.
'I haven't seen any shift from the Taliban to become friendly towards people who supported the UK Armed Forces,' they said.
'There was significant rationale for keeping the super-injunction and that was the threat to life.'
After news of the leak broke, Taliban officials told The Telegraph they were already in possession of the list, and were in the process of hunting down Afghans on it.