Latest news with #militaryDataBreach
Telegraph
18-07-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Afghan migrants bring 22 relatives to UK
Afghans have been able to bring 22 family members to the UK after relatives previously rejected for asylum were allowed in following a military data breach. The disclosure will increase fears that national security could have been compromised in the confusion that followed the most damaging data breach in British history. Government sources say Afghans who were flown to Britain brought an average of eight family members with them, leaving officials scrambling to find accommodation for them. Ministers were even forced to consider 'knocking two houses into one' on military bases to accommodate individual families. But the public was kept in the dark because of a super-injunction that was extended at Sir Grant Shapps's direction shortly before last year's general election. Sir Grant has now been accused of 'trying to rewrite history' after he claimed on Friday he was 'surprised' that the super-injunction stayed in place for so long after it was granted in September 2023, when in truth he successfully appealed against a judge's decision to lift it in May 2024. The Conservative government took action in 2023 when it learnt that a list of nearly 19,000 Afghans who had applied to come to Britain was wrongly shared by a defence official in 2022. The Afghans, who included special forces soldiers, had applied through a scheme for those who had worked with or alongside the British Armed Forces during the war in Afghanistan, making them potential targets of the Taliban. In March last year, the Government set up an emergency scheme, called the Afghanistan Response Route, to airlift people named in the data breach to the UK. Whitehall sources have told The Telegraph that one person who came to the UK was allowed to bring 22 family members, while others were in the 'high teens'. Defence ministers had wanted to restrict arrivals to married couples and their children, but UK courts repeatedly expanded the eligibility criteria, citing the European Convention on Human Rights. There was a dramatic change in the criteria last November, when High Court judge Mrs Justice Yip ruled in a case brought against the Foreign Office by an Afghan already living here that family members did not have to have a blood or legal connection to the applicant. Her ruling stated: 'The term 'family member' does not have any fixed meaning in law or in common usage. Indeed, the word 'family' may mean different things to different people and in different contexts. There may be cultural considerations … there is no requirement for a blood or legal connection.' Court documents previously kept secret by the super-injunction – which was finally lifted earlier this week – show that only 10 per cent of the extended family members that applicants wanted to bring to the UK had been deemed eligible under previously existing routes. The document states: 'Given the increased risk to some AFM [additional family members] as a result of the data incident, officials expect the number of applications and success rate to increase… 'Officials estimate that upwards of 55% of AFM will be eligible in light of the incident – up to approximately 12,500 AFM across all eligible cohorts.' Only 2,200 of those people were deemed eligible previously, meaning Sir Grant was prepared to accept more than 10,000 who had been deemed ineligible. Sources in Afghanistan have told The Telegraph that in the 'chaos' that followed the data breach, criminals, including junior staff who had stolen from British bases and sold weapons to the Taliban, had come to the UK with large numbers of family members, while military commanders who served alongside the Army had been left behind. The resettlement of Afghans in the UK led to major rows in Government, it emerged this week, as Cabinet ministers expressed concerns about the number of bogus claimants who could end up coming to the UK and the implications for national security.
Times
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Times
Gagging order to cover up Afghan leak must never be used again
The Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan in 2021 resulted in a scramble to flee from Kabul airport WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES T hat legal abomination, the superinjunction, is traditionally regarded as the last resort of the desperate celebrity attempting to conceal compromising information. It is a draconian device that not only prohibits the media from reporting a court case — an injunction — but prevents the world from knowing that such an injunction even exists (the 'super' bit). It is intended not so much to stifle legitimate journalistic scrutiny of a court hearing as to smother it. The blanket of secrecy a superinjunction confers means that cases involving serious misconduct by individuals and institutions can go unnoticed by the outside world for months or years, or possibly for ever. Disclosing its very existence can land one in jail. When the party seeking to conceal their actions for this length of time is the government, and when the parties being kept in the dark are the public and parliament, it risks becoming a tool of authoritarianism. Yet that is exactly what has occurred in a case revealed by this newspaper. One in which a military data breach that placed tens of thousands of Afghans in jeopardy, and resulted in a covert rescue and resettlement programme potentially costing £7 billion, being hidden for two years in what the judge finally lifting the order called a vacuum of scrutiny. It is the first time a British government has used a superinjunction in this way and it must be the last. In observing its terms, in place for so much longer than intended, ministers misled parliament, if largely by omission, concealing from relevant committees and the Commons as a whole a scandal that should have resulted in heads rolling down Whitehall. It concerned the unauthorised release in February 2022 of a Ministry of Defence database containing the names of tens of thousands of Afghans at risk of retribution from the restored Taliban regime. The list was transmitted by a soldier at a special forces barracks in London to Afghan contacts in Britain as he attempted to verify applications for sanctuary in Britain. The list subsequently found its way to Afghanistan. • Did the risk ever justify the secrecy in this Kafkaesque calamity? When one of the individuals it was passed to threatened to publish it on Facebook it became a potential death warrant for many of those named, and possibly their relatives. As a result, the then Conservative government decided to relocate thousands of Afghans, adults and children, to Britain in a covert programme that was later endorsed by the current Labour government. Incredibly, the existence of this operation, involving some 23,000 people, was kept secret even from the discreet Commons intelligence and security committee. The superinjunction was granted in September 2023, supposedly as a four-month measure to help cloak a rescue. But it would last for almost two years, the MoD continuing to insist that it was necessary to save lives, though there was a possibility that the database had already fallen into the possession of the Taliban. Whatever the reality of this, the superinjunction continued to act as a shield for official incompetence. Due to the continuing secrecy surrounding this fiasco it is not known who, if anyone, was disciplined for the breach. What is clear is the disquiet of a High Court judge involved in hearings in which The Times and Daily Mail sought to have details of the scandal released. At one point Mr Justice Chamberlain warned that it could be perceived as censorship. Concerns were also raised that the government was using the gagging order to control the narrative surrounding the scandal. Unfortunately, he was overruled by a court of appeal again swayed by MoD warnings of potential disaster. Now, those objections have evaporated, the risks apparently being overstated according to a review. So much for parliamentary and press oversight. In terms of free speech the superinjunction is a weapon of mass destruction. No government should be allowed to employ one again.
