UK Afghan asylum scandal comes to light after super-injunction lifted

Thousands of Afghans who worked with the UK and their families were brought to Britain in a secret program after a 2022 data breach put their lives at risk, the British government has revealed.

Defense minister John Healey unveiled the scheme to parliament after the UK High Court on Tuesday lifted a super-injunction order banning any reports of the events.

In February 2022, a spreadsheet containing the names and details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to be relocated to Britain was accidentally leaked by a UK official just six months after Taliban fighters seized Kabul, Healey said.

"This was a serious departmental error," Healey said, adding: "Lives may have been at stake."

The previous Conservative government put in place a secret program in April 2024 to help those "judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban," he said.

Some 900 Afghans and 3,600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the program known as the Afghan Response Route, at a cost of around $535 million, Healey said.  Applications from 600 more people have also been accepted, bringing the estimated total cost of the scheme to $1.37 billion.

They are among some 36,000 Afghans who have been accepted by Britain under different schemes since the August 2021 power shift of Kabul.

As Labour's opposition defense spokesman, Healey was briefed on the scheme in December 2023 but the Conservative government asked a court to impose a super-injunction banning any mention of it in parliament or by the press.

When Labour came to power in July 2024, the scheme was in full swing but Healey said he had been "deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting" to parliament. 

"Ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset," he explained.

Healey set up a review of the scheme when he became defense minister in the new Labour government. This concluded there was "very little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution."

The Afghan Response Route has now been closed, the minister said, apologising for the data breach which "should never have happened". 

He estimated the total cost of relocating people from Afghanistan to Britain at between $7.36 billion and $8.03bn.

'No apology' from former defense chief

Conservative leader Kemi Bednoch and her defense spokesman James Cartlidge also apologized for the leak, which happened under their party's previous administraion. 

However, Cartlidge defended the decision to keep it secret, saying the aim had been to avoid "an error by an official of the British state leading to torture or even murder of persons in the dataset at the hands of what remains a brutal Taliban regime".

The Conservative defense minister at the time, Sir Ben Wallace, said he made "no apology" for applying for the injunction.

"It was not, as some are childishly trying to claim, a cover-up," he wrote in The Telegraph. "I took the view that if this leak was reported at the time, the existence of the list would put in peril those we needed to help out."

Healey said all those brought to the UK from Afghanistan had been accounted for in the country's immigration figures. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to cut the number of migrants arriving in Britain.

In 2023, the UK defense ministry was fined $468,000 by a data watchdog for disclosing personal information of 265 Afghans seeking to flee Taliban fighters in the chaotic take over of Kabul two years earlier.

Britain's Afghanistan evacuation plan was widely criticized, with the government accused by MPs of "systemic failures of leadership, planning and preparation."

Hundreds of Afghans eligible for relocation were left behind, many with their lives potentially at risk after details of staff and job applicants were left at the abandoned British embassy in Kabul.

Lawsuits

The daughter of an Afghan translator whose details were leaked told the BBC her family remain "panicked" by the leak.

"No one knows where the data has been sent to - it could be sent to the Taliban, they could have their hands on it," she told BBC's Newsnight program.

She said her grandmother still lives in Afghanistan and "completely vulnerable".

A Ministry of Defence source told The i: "Ben Wallace, David Cameron, all those ministers who were in charge and oversaw the data breach, they all have questions to answer as to why they applied for the superinjunction, why they created a secret resettlement route.

They have never said why they did this, and about them accounting for their own actions."

The government is facing lawsuits from those affected by the breach, further adding to the ultimate cost of the incident.

Sean Humber, a lawyer at Leigh Day who has acted for Afghan citizens affected by previous data breaches, said those affected were "likely to have strong claims for substantial compensation" for the anxiety and distress caused by the leak.

British forces were first deployed to Afghanistan in 2001 following the September 11 attacks on the United States, and they played a major role in combat operations there until 2014.