Latest news with #High Court
The Independent
20 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
How MoD covered up data breach that put Afghans at risk of Taliban reprisals
The Ministry of Defence used an unprecedented superinjunction to conceal a data breach that put an estimated 100,000 Afghans at risk from the Taliban. This superinjunction was granted 'contra mundum' (against the world), meaning it applied to everyone, and was believed to be the first of its kind granted to the British government. The order, proactively granted by Mr Justice Knowles on 1 September 2023, remained in force for over 21 months. High Court judges, including Mr Justice Nicklin and Mr Justice Chamberlain, voiced concerns regarding the exceptional nature of the superinjunction and its impact on public trust and government accountability. The superinjunction was lifted on 15 July after defence secretary John Healey determined it was no longer necessary following a policy review that revised risk assessments for the affected individuals.
Times
20 hours ago
- Politics
- Times
Afghan leak: Judge decries ‘scrutiny vacuum' as he lifts gag order — live
The Ministry of Defence feared that if knowledge of the dataset became public then the Taliban would find it and be able to start working through what one activist described as a 'kill list'. Conservative ministers secured a superinjunction in the High Court on September 1, 2023, which prevented anyone reporting the incident or that a court order even existed. When Labour came to power in July 2024 they continued to argue it should remain in place and it was not until January this year that John Healey, the defence secretary, ordered a review of the policy. Afghans who were on the 'kill list' were not told that their lives may be at risk despite concerns the Taliban could suddenly come into possession of the list. At about 10am on Thursday January 25, 2024, I called a senior member of the Ministry of Defence press office, whom I had known for years, to tell them I was aware of a data leak. It had put lives at risk and it was the subject of a superinjunction, I said. I told him I had known about the matters for some time and wanted to join the court proceedings. I did not realise at the time that everything I said during that initial phone call would be written down and submitted to the High Court. It would form part of a 1,568-page bundle of evidence documenting the longest ever superinjunction and the only to be sought by a government. I had no idea of the magnitude of what I was dealing with. • Read in full: Our defence editor recounts being silenced by government Tens of thousands of Afghans have begun receiving an email from the UK government telling them their data has been breached. In the email, seen by The Times, they are warned their information was sent outside 'secure systems' and may have been 'compromised'. 'We understand this news may be concerning,' it says. The email urges the Afghans to 'exercise caution and not take phone calls or respond to messages or emails from unknown contacts'. It also urges Afghans not to travel to third countries without a valid passport and visa. 'If you do so, you will be putting yourself at risk on the journey, and you may face the risk of being deported back to Afghanistan,' it says. One activist told The Times her phone was 'blowing up' with messages from concerned Afghans. Alarm bells rang in the summer of 2023 when an activist helping Afghans who had served with UK forces during the war reached out to a defence minister. It was 9.57am on Tuesday, August 15. 'Person A', as she later became known in court documents, was panicking. She had become aware of a massive data breach involving tens of thousands of Afghans. What the government did next — and how quickly — was a matter of life and death. • Read in full: MoD evacuates Afghans — without them knowing why Successive governments had tried to stop the public and parliament from knowing about the data breach in the Ministry of Defence, which it had said put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of torture and death. The Afghans, some of whom had served alongside UK forces during the war, had applied for sanctuary in the UK because of fears they could be targeted by the Taliban. But a database containing their confidential information, including their contact details and names of their family members was sent by a British soldier to Afghans already in the UK who then passed it on to individuals in Afghanistan. One of those who received the dataset threatened to post its contents in a Facebook group 18 months later. The British military is responsible for a data leak that put up to 100,000 Afghans at risk of death — and successive governments have spent years fighting to keep it secret using an unprecedented superinjunction. UK government officials were left exposed when in February 2022 a soldier inadvertently sent a list of tens of thousands of names to Afghans as he tried to help verify applications for sanctuary in Britain. • Read in full: 'Kill list' sent in error leads to £7bn cover-up The longest ever superinjunction and the first to have been secured by the government has been lifted in the High Court after nearly two years and a lengthy legal battle spearheaded by The Times. Mr Justice Chamberlain said the 'long-running and unprecedented' order, which stopped the world from knowing about a data breach concerning Afghans applying to come to Britain, had given rise to 'serious free speech concerns' and had left a 'scrutiny vacuum'. Handing down his judgment at midday on Tuesday, he said the gagging order had the effect of 'completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy'. The superinjunction was in place for 683 days.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Haredi rabbi calls Likud MK Yuli Edelstein 'traitor' over draft law
'There's someone in Likud who is a traitor to Israel and a scheming saboteur because he wants to rule and become prime minister,' says Butbul. A prominent Sephardi haredi (ultra-Orthodox) leader, Rabbi Aharon Butbul, launched sharp criticism against Likud MKYuli Edelstein, chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, and Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit regarding the draft law. On his weekly program on Kol B'Rama Radio, Butbul accused a Likud MK of being a "traitor to Israel" and a "scheming saboteur" motivated by personal ambition to become prime minister. "There's someone in Likud who is a traitor to Israel and a scheming saboteur because he wants to rule and become prime minister," Butbul declared. He continued, 'Even if the conscription law passes in three readings in the Knesset, there's a very high chance that the High Court will overturn it. Right now, sitting on the High Court is Yitzhak Amit, who thinks of himself as prime minister and even more. I don't want to say anything too harsh, but he decides everything and will determine what is legal and what is not.' Meanwhile, haredi political parties have renewed their threat to escalate their opposition to the coalition due to the ongoing absence of a draft of the conscription law. The haredim have resumed their boycott of voting, and there are talks of extending it by refusing to participate in Knesset votes with the coalition unless a draft of the law is presented to the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. This move could dramatically affect the coalition, especially with government bills set to be brought before the Knesset for second and third readings on Monday. A collapse of such bills could hasten the coalition's demise even more than a preliminary vote to dissolve the Knesset. The Jerusalem Post reported last Tuesday that the text of a law regulating haredi IDF service is expected to be published within days, and the legislative process will likely resume in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee at some point next week, a spokesperson for committee chairman Edelstein said Thursday. The text is expected to reflect agreements reached between Edelstein and representatives of the Knesset's haredi parties on June 12, the eve of theIsraeli strike against Iran, with some adaptations, the spokesperson said. IDF sources said that 54,000 draft orders would be sent to eligible haredi men who have yet to receive them as soon as July 8. As of June 2024, there is no legal exemption from IDF service for the more than 80,000 eligible haredi men. Government representatives pledged to the High Court of Justice that the IDF would draft a maximum capacity of 4,800 haredim in the 2024-2025 draft year, which ended on June 30. However, the IDF only reached about half this number. Eliav Breuer contributed to this report.
Times
3 days ago
- Politics
- Times
The IDF soldiers defying Netanyahu's expulsion zone in Gaza
When the Israeli soldier first entered Gaza, he believed the war was righteous. But with each passing deployment, Avshalom Zohar Sal's missions made less and less sense to him and the war goals grew murkier and murkier. 'What I saw the first time I entered was not what I encountered the second time, nor the third nor the fourth,' he said. 'Every time, Gaza looked different, the mission looked different, and my personal feelings were different.' The step that Sal, 28, then took has put him at the heart of an extraordinary power struggle in Israel. He and two friends, reservists serving in the war, hired lawyers to petition the High Court to rule on whether Israel's actions in Gaza nearly two years after the atrocities of October 7, 2023, had become a violation of international law. The appeal is a 'last resort' for the petitioners, who 'suspect that the leaders of the state and the army are asking them to be partner to a war that has forced displacement, forced transfer and even the expulsion of thousands, millions of citizens at its core'. At the same time Binyamin Netanyahu 's government was drawing up a plan to transfer part of the population of southern Gaza into an enclosed camp containing only vetted civilians. Anyone outside of the 'humanitarian city', which could include up to 600,000 people, would then be considered a terrorist and a potential target of Israeli fire. Two months after the petition was lodged, the office of Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, the chief of staff, issued his response last weekend, stating that the 'concentration and movement of the population are not part of the objectives of the war, and that the IDF certainly does not force the population to move inside or outside the Gaza Strip'. The refusal marked an unprecedented red line through the defence ministry's blueprint and reportedly led to a heated exchange between Zamir and Netanyahu during a war cabinet meeting. Israel's acknowledged war goals are to destroy Hamas and free the remaining hostages taken on October 7, when about 1,200 people were killed in Israel. 'If the mission is now, expulsion, occupation and Jewish settlement, like they are discussing, then it's an illegal one and I will not do it,' said Sal. 'This will either lead to an unprecedented confrontation between the army and state, the likes of which we've never seen before, or the army will bow and salute the order, and carry out a plan that will harm Israel for generations to come.' Gazans at al-Shifa hospital mourn relatives killed by Israeli bombing on Saturday MAJDI FATHI/NURPHOTO/SHUTTERSTOCK More than 56,000 people have died in the conflict, according to the Hamas-run health ministry and charities say that a large proportion of Gaza's 2.3 million people are at risk of starvation because of Israeli restrictions on food and medicine. A report based on interviews with soldiers by +972 Magazine in Israel said that civilian evacuations in Gaza are sometimes enforced by drones used to bomb civilians to force them to leave their homes or prevent them from returning to evacuated areas. Negotiations are continuing over a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which would allow the release of some of the hostages still held in Gaza. It had been hoped that a deal would be struck last week. • Israel Katz, the defence minister, has said that he planned to use that time to build an encampment for civilians in the largely destroyed city of Rafah, where Israeli troops will remain stationed, one of the sticking points of the deal. It was Katz's earlier offer for Palestinians to 'voluntarily emigrate' with no return date, that persuaded Sal and his friends to submit their petition. The deadline for his ministry to issue a response passed on Thursday. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) say there is no disagreement between the government and the army. A senior general said that civilians would be moved according to international law the same way they have been moved throughout the war: by issuing evacuation orders to numbered blocks that correspond with certain areas and turning those areas into active combat zones, giving civilians 24-72 hours to clear out or else be considered an active threat. The transfer of the Gazan population is not a war goal, said Brigadier General Oren Solomon, because the war goal is to eliminate Hamas. But the way to do it is to separate the general population from the terrorists by building several camps. 'We don't go against the political directives. We act on them. The debate is over how it will happen, and we know that we can't just make one place. We understand that the humanitarian city can't take the entire population, so we must make a few like that,' Solomon said. ABDALHKEM ABU RIASH/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES The pilot plan is to move 600,000 Palestinians in the tent city of Al-Mawasi, a narrow strip of coastal land where thousands of homeless Palestinians reside. Israel says Hamas are hiding among the displaced civilians, and so Al-Mawasi must be cleared out and the civilians checked and moved to the 'sterile' zone with 'tents, water, medical care, food — all without being stolen by Hamas'. The plan has been discussed in the Israeli media, but there has been little reaction from mainstream society, which remains traumatised by October 7. 'The sentiment of the majority of the population are indifferent to the humanitarian situation in Gaza,' said Idit Shafran Gittleman, a former director of the military and society programme at the Israel Democracy Institute. 'Their main thought is, 'Don't give us October 7 again. Do whatever you need to do so we can live here without this fear of October coming again.'' She does not see a scenario where there is mass refusal to serve, nor a situation where the prime minister will sack the new army chief. If the plan is passed through the cabinet, the army must enact it. However, the legal apparatus — including a court ruling against the transfer brought on by Sal's petition — may stop the plan in its tracks. It has come at a personal cost for the educator and reservist, who is about to move in with his girlfriend to a kibbutz on the Gaza border. 'People will see this and call me a traitor from one side, and a Palestinian child killer on the other,' Sal said. 'No one thinks about this situation that I find myself in as an Israeli citizen. I am different from what the government purports to represent, that I possess values rooted in Judaism and Israel that are completely anti-war.'
