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UK secretly resettled 4,500 Afghans in Britain after huge data breach

UK secretly resettled 4,500 Afghans in Britain after huge data breach

Boston Globe20 hours ago
Super injunctions are legal mechanisms in Britain that prevent news organizations from publishing a report on a topic or even from referring to the fact that a court order has been granted. In this case, critics said, the government's initially legitimate interest in protecting the safety of Afghans was supplanted over time by a desire to avoid an embarrassing headline during an election year.
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In a statement to Parliament on Tuesday, John Healey, the defense secretary for the current government, which is led by the Labor Party, said, 'I am closing this resettlement route; I'm disclosing the data loss and confirm that the court order was lifted at 12 noon today.'
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Healey described the injunction, to which he was also subjected, as unprecedented, adding that he had been 'deeply concerned about the lack of transparency to Parliament and the public.'
The personal data of thousands of Afghans, Healey said, was accidentally disclosed in an email from a defense official that was sent outside authorized channels in 2022. The scale of the breach was only discovered in August 2023, when details of nine individuals surfaced on social media.
Alarmed by the disclosure, the Conservative government created a secret resettlement plan, called the Afghan Response Route, which has so far relocated 4,500 Afghans to Britain at a cost of about $537 million. A further 600 people and their immediate families are still to arrive, and the cost could rise to a total of around $1.13 billion.
Healey said that after he came to office following last year's election, he commissioned an independent report on the matter, which was published Tuesday. Compiled by a former senior civil servant, Paul Rimmer, the report concluded that there was little evidence that the Taliban were intent on a campaign of retribution or that the exposed spreadsheet would prompt them to act against Afghans who had worked with the British.
'Given the nearly four years since the Taliban takeover,' the report said, 'posing a current threat or resistance to Taliban rule is likely to be a far more persuasive factor in the threat faced by individuals in Afghanistan, rather than former affiliations.'
The breach began, Healey said, when an unnamed employee in the Defense Ministry emailed a file about an existing resettlement scheme, known as the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, which was intended for those who had worked for, or with, British forces in Afghanistan. The email was sent outside authorized systems, and it contained the names and information of those applying mainly to that program, as well as the personal details of some family members.
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'This official mistakenly believed that they were sending the details of 150 applicants. However, the spreadsheet in fact contained personal information associated to 18,714 Afghans,' Healey said, apologizing for what he called a serious error.
The government's decision to seek an injunction was swiftly approved by a High Court judge in September 2023, soon after journalists learned of the data breach. It was upheld in two later rulings, though in a third hearing, Justice Martin Chamberlain ordered it to be lifted because it was likely that the Taliban already had the names of the Afghans. The government appealed his ruling, however, and it was overturned, leaving the super injunction in place.
The data disclosure stirred awkward memories of Britain's fraught exit from Afghanistan, which many blamed on the United States. President Trump had negotiated a deal with the Taliban during his first term that set a timetable for pulling out US troops. President Joe Biden then presided over the chaotic, bloodstained withdrawal as Taliban fighters swept into a defenseless Kabul, the capital.
But Britain's government was harshly criticized as well. Dominic Raab, then the foreign secretary, lingered on vacation on the Greek island of Crete even as Kabul was falling, contributing to the portrait of an out-of-touch government.
The prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, was accused of favoring pets over people after emails surfaced which suggested that he pushed for the evacuation of cats and dogs by a British animal charity. He denied the accusations.
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