Secret Afghan resettlement scheme set up after government data breach

Earlier today the High Court handed down a judgment discharging a super-injunction granted to the Ministry of Defence on 1 September 2023. Following on from this, five previously private judgments have also been published, four by the High Court and one from the Court of Appeal. The case is Ministry of Defence -v- Global Media and Entertainment Limited and others and all of the relevant decisions can be found here.

The super-injunction was granted to prevent disclosure of the fact that someone working for the UK government had released a dataset with the personal data of those who had applied for relocation to the UK from Afghanistan following the Taliban coup in 2021 under the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy and the Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme.

The data was released early in 2022 and in August 2023 the Ministry of Defence became aware that part of the data had been published on Facebook. This led to the application for an injunction.

The order of 1 September 2023 also prevented disclosure of the existence of the injunction. This was deemed necessary in order to prevent the Taliban from learning about the data breach and potentially acquiring the data, putting those affected at risk of extra-judicial killing or severe mistreatment. Several further hearings took place between October 2023 and February 2024 and the court maintained the super-injunction.

On 21 May 2024 the High Court decided that the super-injunction should be lifted. The reasons for this included the lack of public scrutiny of the resettlement scheme that had been put in place for those put at risk by the data breach, as well as the potential risk to those who were not to be resettled if the Taliban already had the data and who would be unaware of this because of the super-injunction.

The Ministry of Defence appealed to the Court of Appeal which overturned the High Court’s decision, concluding that there was no material change from the situation when the previous decisions were made in relation to the super-injunction. The court said that the position must be reviewed by the High Court at least every three months.

In February 2025 the Ministry of Defence told the court that it had commissioned a review of the relocation policy. In June 2025 that review (annexed to judgment 4) concluded [at para 25 of judgment 4]:

that acquisition of the dataset by the Taliban is “unlikely to substantially change an individual’s existing exposure given the volume of data already available”. It also includes the conclusions that “it appears unlikely that merely being on the dataset would be grounds for targeting” and it is “therefore also unlikely that family members—immediate or more distant—will be targeted simply because the ‘Principal’ appears in the… dataset”.

Following the review, on 4 July 2025 the Government Legal Department confirmed that the Defence Secretary had taken the decision to discontinue the relocation programme and to apply to discharge the injunction. There was an attempt by Special Advocates acting on behalf of Afghan nationals to oppose the discharge of the super-injunction, but the High Court said:

In essence, there is no plausible basis on which a challenge to the conclusions in the review report would have any real prospect of success, given the wide range of sources on which it is based and the respect which the courts are required to give in public law proceedings to predictive assessments of the kind it contains. In light of the conclusions of the review, there is no tenable basis for the continuation of the super-injunction. This is particularly so given the serious interference it involves with the rights of the media defendants to freedom of expression and the correlative right of the public to receive the information they wish to impart

The court ordered the super-injunction discharged from 12pm today. A narrower injunction was granted preventing disclosure of the personal data or describing the types of information contained in the “case notes” section of the dataset.

The Defence Secretary has today announced to Parliament that the scheme set up in response to the data breach, known as the Afghan Response Route, has been closed. It is unclear from the judgment how many people were relocated solely as a result of the data breach, as there seems to be some overlap with those who would have been resettled anyway. However in today’s statement the Defence Secretary has referred to 908 people arriving under this scheme with a further 600 invitations outstanding which will be honoured despite today’s closure of the scheme.

This all being made public shortly following the Triples scandal makes it difficult to imagine how much worse the government could have handled the resettlement of at risk Afghans.