15 July 2025, 12:12 | Updated: 15 July 2025, 12:29

By Lewis Goodall

Can justice, conducted in secret, ever truly be justice?

This is a question with which I have much cause to wrestle, for some 23 months.

Nearly two years ago, in August 2023, I received a phone call from a source in Whitehall. They told me that there had been, in their words, a “catastrophic” data breach in the Ministry of Defence. The breach, the source said, consisted of a dataset containing the names and contact details of all those people who had applied for asylum in the UK under the ARAP programme.

ARAP was the scheme established by the British government in 2021 to provide a route for asylum to those thousands of people who had worked with the UK armed forces in the two-decade-long military operation in the country- the UK’s longest war. We later learnt that the dataset comprised over 18,000 people and that, when family members were taken into account, could number around 100,000 people - all of whom could be at risk of Taliban reprisal for working with Western forces.

I knew this was a huge story. I also knew it was fraught with risk for those involved, and I needed to bring in the MoD. Before I knew where I was, I’d been invited to an injunction hearing. I was surprised - I’d made it clear to the MoD I wouldn’t report anything without their cooperation. Nonetheless, in an emergency online session, the government made the case that the risk to life was so great that they needed to be sure that knowledge of the incident went no further, by force of law. No one should be allowed to report anything. Remarkably, the judge involved, Justice Robin Knowles, offered the government more than they’d requested - indeed, a constitutional innovation.

He suggested that they ought to have a superinjunction, i.e., that not only would I not be permitted to report the story, but that I could not even report that I had been prevented from reporting the story. To our knowledge, this has never happened before. Superinjunctions are usually the preserve of celebrities and individuals who, for one reason or another, wish to protect their privacy. It is far rarer for organisations or private companies to employ them, or at least for the courts to grant them. It is unknown for governments to use them to protect their own mistakes.

Naturally, this made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I expressed my discomfort in court about the need to balance potential harm with the freedoms of the press. The Judge said that there was no balance to be struck. But my angst was modest; the government at the time made clear that they saw this injunction as a strictly time-limited affair. They simply wished to put in place the measures they needed to protect those who needed it and remove them from the country, where possible. This seemed reasonable to me.

Months went by, yet we heard nothing. To my surprise, given that by now I was aware the breach had taken place in early 2022 and had been discussed openly in an Afghan Facebook forum, there wasn’t any wider reporting in the media. Eventually, we were summoned to another hearing, where I expected news that the super would be discharged, or at the very least a date when that would happen. To my astonishment, there was no prospect of this- instead, the government was changing the rules of the game. It became clear, via the court documents, that initially at least, the then Sunak government was not proposing to help very many people as a result of the breach at all. Only around 200 principals, possibly up to 1,000 in all, including family members, 1% of the total number potentially affected and at least some risk.

Despite the relatively modest efforts to relocate people, the........

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