On 1st September 2023, a contra mundum (against the world) super-injunction was granted to the government. At the time it was discharged, midday on Tuesday 15th July 2025, it had been in effect for a little over 22 months.
The injunction had prohibited anybody with knowledge of it from sharing information from, or about, a data leak at the Ministry of Defence. It also prohibited acknowledgement of the injunction itself.
The first section of this blog explains what a super-injunction is. The second section sets out the timeline, from the establishment of the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy in April 2021 to the discharge of the injunction on Tuesday 15th July 2025.
The third section, by Paul Foster, highlights the role of the news media in fighting this injunction.
The fourth section, by Paul Magrath, considers how there has been a lack of scrutiny of the judicial process as well as the underlying circumstances that gave rise to the super-injunction.
What is a super-injunction?
As a recent Substack from The Empty City puts it, ‘an injunction is – very generally – a court Order which tells a person to do a thing or not do a thing, on pain of it being punishable as a contempt of court.’ If an injunction has a “super” element, acknowledgement of the injunction itself is also prohibited.
A report on the use of super-injunctions explains the distinction: ‘a super-injunction not only binds those against whom it is issued, but also any third parties who have notice of the injunction […] By contrast, a final injunction, e.g., one made at trial following the final determination of the parties’ substantive rights, only binds those against whom it is made’ (p18, §2.6-2.7).
Bringing this all together, a contra mundum super-injunction: a) prohibits disclosure of the Information that the injunction is designed to protect; b) prohibits disclosure of the existence of the injunction; c) applies to everybody who discovers either a) or b).
In 2010, there was growing concern about the granting of super-injunctions, some of which arose from what became known as the Trafigura case. The company Trafigura had been granted a super-injunction to prevent any reporting about the dumping of toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. The injunction was discharged when Paul Farrelly MP used Parliamentary privilege to raise the issue in Parliament.
Amidst this rising concern, a committee was convened by the Master of the Rolls, which published its report in 2011.
The report acknowledges there is ‘no question’ that a super-injunction can prohibit the speech of an MP who is using parliamentary privilege to either discuss the prohibited Information or the fact of the injunction itself (p68, §6.8).
However, the Trafigura case raised the issue of whether a super-injunction could prevent the media from reporting on what an MP, using parliamentary privilege, said in Parliament. The committee considered this to be ‘an open question’ but noted that ‘unfettered reporting of Parliamentary proceedings (in apparent breach of court orders) has not been established as a clear right’ (p76, §6.33).
We are told that this is the first time a contra mundum super-injunction has been granted to the government. This claim is unverifiable because, if other such injunctions are in place, those with knowledge of them would not be allowed to say.
The best that the writers of the above report could say was that applications for super-injunctions are rare ‘as far as the Committee is aware’ (see p.iv). At a press conference marking its release, the then Master of the Rolls (Lord Neuberger) confirmed he could not say ‘precisely’ how many anonymised injunctions or super-injunctions had been granted between 2000-2011 (p.2). Since then, a new data collection regime has been introduced; however, concerns remain about the accuracy of the resulting data, which is published biannually in the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly reports (latest here).
The timeline
The judgments relating to the super-injunction granted to the government were published at midday on Tuesday 15th July 2025. Paul Magrath has set out those judgments, the relevant Orders, and the corresponding dates:
| 2 September 2023 | An Application For An Injunction Contra Mundum Brought By The Secretary Of State For Defence [Robin Knowles] [Order] |
| 23 November 2023 | Secretary of State for Defence v Persons Unknown [2023] EWHC 2999 (KB) [Chamberlain 1] |
| 15 February 2024 | Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2024] EWHC 312 (KB) [Chamberlain 2] |
| 21 May 2024 | Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2024] EWHC 1220 (KB) [Chamberlain 3] |
| 26 July 2024 | Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2024] EWCA Civ 838 – [on appeal from [2024] EWHC 1220 (KB)] |
| 15 July 2025 | Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2025] EWHC 1806 (Admin) [Chamberlain 4] [Order] |
This timeline of events has considered all these judgments, including other materials published by the government and the media.
In April 2021, the then government launched the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (ARAP). This was designed to support ‘Afghan citizens who worked for or with the UK Government in Afghanistan in exposed or meaningful roles and may include an offer of relocation to the UK for those deemed eligible by the Ministry of Defence and who are deemed suitable for relocation by the Home Office’.
In August 2021, the Taliban took over the governance of Afghanistan.
In February 2022, a dataset containing the information of Afghan citizens who had applied for relocation to the UK under the ARAP scheme was accidentally shared outside of government systems. It contained data relating to more than 18,000 people, which included information about more than 100 Britons, some of whom were members of the special forces.
In August 2023, part of the dataset was published in a Facebook group. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) only became aware of this breach when a journalist alerted them to it.
Although this was not what the MoD originally applied for, Mr Justice Robin Knowles granted a super-injunction on 1st September 2023. This prohibited dissemination of the information within the dataset, as well as its accidental release (the injunction). It further prohibited acknowledgement that the injunction existed (the “super” element) and applied to everybody who had notice of the injunction (the contra mundum element).
This injunction was granted because there was a real risk of harm to those whose information was in the dataset, and there was no evidence that the Taliban yet had access to the information.
Robin Knowles J built a series of safeguards into the Order, including keeping it under regular review. The case was listed to be back before him on 1st December 2023.
On 18th September 2023, Mr Justice Nicklin made an order of his own motion. He directed that there be a hearing before a judge who sits in the Media and Communications List, for consideration of whether the injunction should be continued or discharged.
At some point in Autumn 2023, the then government launched the Afghanistan Response Route (ARR). This new settlement scheme was for those whose name was included in the dataset but who were not eligible under the ARAP scheme. The super-injunction also prohibited any reporting of the ARR scheme.
The case was allocated to Mr Justice Chamberlain, who heard the case in private, with an Advocate to the Court and representatives of media organisations present. He also heard part of the case in closed hearings, from which the media were excluded.
On 3rd November 2023, Mr Justice Chamberlain extended the injunction for a further four weeks. He did not discharge the “super” part of the injunction because this would jeopardise the protection granted to the Information. In the judgment from that hearing, Chamberlain J was clear that, ‘interim injunctions must not be allowed to continue indefinitely. That is especially true for super-injunctions […] The question whether to continue the injunction in its current form, or to discharge or modify it, must and will be kept under review’ (§46-47).
At a hearing on 1st December 2023, the court was told that the factual position was unaltered but evolving. Chamberlain J therefore extended the injunction by a further four weeks. It was extended again on 18th December 2023.
On Wednesday 13th December 2023, the then Minister of Armed Forces, James Heappey, gave a statement to the House of Commons. It was in response to a statement by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) about ‘an Afghan relocation and resettlement policy scheme data incident involving group emails sent in September 2021’. This was a separate data incident, and the government established a financial compensation scheme for those affected.
Chamberlain J next heard the case on 1st February 2024. Global Media, The Independent, and The Times were joined as parties. The closed proceedings continued.
In his judgment from the hearing on 1st February 2024, Chamberlain J distinguished the situation from that of the injunctions that gave rise to public concern. He described the circumstances as
‘unprecedented. The public and Parliamentary disquiet which led to the issue of the Master of the Rolls’ Guidance in 2011 stemmed from the use of super-injunctions to prevent disclosure of information about the private lives of celebrities. In this case, the underlying information is of a wholly different character. I am aware of no reported case where the potential damage which the injunction seeks to prevent is as serious as here. However, as I said in my first judgment, the decision whether to maintain the super-injunction is nonetheless a difficult one, because the damage that might be caused by continuation of the injunction also has the potential to be exceptionally grave’. (§30).
He expressed concern that ‘the continuation of the super-injunction involves a serious interference with the right of the media defendants to freedom of expression and the correlative right of the public to be informed about these vitally important decisions. Moreover, and more pertinently, it is possible that the decisions might be different if they were subject to media and Parliamentary scrutiny’ (§31(f)).
Nevertheless, the judge extended the injunction further, with a return date of 27th and 28th March 2024. Chamberlain J directed that the MoD provide a corporate witness who would be cross-examined by representatives of the media.
Due to the lateness of evidence, the hearing date was changed to 30th April and 1st May 2024. Chamberlain J decided that the injunction should be discharged 21 days after the handing down of the judgment.
There were three primary reasons for this decision:
§35(a): The injunction was possibly having an endangering effect on some of the relocation cohort.
§35(b): The injunction would reduce the ability of those who would not be re-located, but may nevertheless be at threat from the Taliban, to plan for the event that the Taliban did gain access to the dataset. The injunction also meant those who would not be re-located could not ‘benefit from public pressure on the Government to do more for them’.
§35(c): The scale of decision-making, including the financial implications, ‘makes further secrecy unlikely to be sustainable for the very substantial period that would be necessary to relocate to the UK the cohort which have been offered the change to apply for it. The effect of the decision-making on UK citizens (as well as on the Affected Persons) makes the enterprise of maintaining secrecy for that period objectionable as a matter of principle’.
The judgment was handed down on 21st May 2024.
On 22nd May 2024, the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, announced that there would be a general election on 4th July 2024.
The government appealed Chamberlain J’s order that discharged the super-injunction. That order was stayed, pending the appeal, and in a judgment handed down on 26th July 2024 (the hearing was on 25th and 26th May), the Court of Appeal retained the injunction.
They found that Chamberlain J had not adequately factored into his decision making the consequences of discharging the injunction if the information in the dataset, and the fact of its leak, was not already known to the Taliban. The Court of Appeal also held that the “super” element of the injunction was necessary ‘to guard against a real and substantial risk that a hostile actor could deduce the nature of the data breach with a consequent risk to life’ (§6).
On 25th June 2025, the day before the case was listed to return to court, Chamberlain J received a copy of a report (see below) commissioned by the MoD. At a closed hearing on 1st July 2025, it was submitted that the super-injunction should be discharged.
On 1st July 2025, the current government “suddenly closed” the ARAP scheme.
On 4th July 2025, the Government Legal Department confirmed the Secretary of State’s intention to apply to discharge the injunction.
In his judgment discharging the injunction, Chamberlain J discusses the implications of the review (which is included as an annex to the judgment). It concluded that the Taliban likely already possess the information in the dataset (though perhaps not the dataset itself), that the likelihood of those in the dataset being targeted was low, and that the Taliban gaining possession of the dataset was ‘unlikely substantially to raise the risk faced by the individuals whose data it includes’ (§4).
Furthermore, the conclusion of the review ‘fundamentally undermine the evidential basis on which I […] and the Court of Appeal relied in deciding that the super-injunction should be continued’ (§26).
At the end of his judgment, Chamberlain J describes the assessment contained in the report as,
‘very different from those on which the super-injunction was sought and granted. The change is in part due to the passage of time. However, it also reflects information gathered from within Government, from speaking to third parties with knowledge of the situation in Afghanistan and from considering open-source documents. I have recently received a CLOSED witness statement which explains which of this material was available to those who undertook the initial assessment […] It will be for others to consider whether lessons can be learned from the way the initial assessment in this case were prepared and whether the courts were, or are generally, right to accord such weight to assessment of this kind’ (§33).
Comment from members of the Court and Tribunals Observers’ Network
Paul Foster, a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Portsmouth, highlights the role of the news media in fighting this injunction.
Politicians and, indeed, the courts have rightly faced criticism after it was revealed a super-injunction prevented the reporting of a serious data breach involving Afghan nationals. For two years, it was a draconian and highly unprecedented assault on open justice.
But what tends to get lost amid the fury is the role of the news media and its actions in fighting this order.
When the data breach first surfaced, The Daily Mail approached the Ministry of Defence for comment. Following advice from the Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, it agreed not to publish the story, according to The Guardian. Remember, these so-called “D-Notices” are not legally binding – it was an ethical decision to hold off publishing.
Once the super-injunction came into force, the news media – as it tends to do when confronted with a blanket reporting ban – rolls up its sleeves and prepares for a fight.
It did this successfully with other such past super-injunctions: the Trafigura case in 2009 (Guardian prevented from reporting details of toxic waste dumping in Ivory Coast); John Terry from 2010 (revealing an affair with an England teammate’s partner); and Ryan Giggs in 2011 (an extra-marital relationship). I’m not sure the news media thought this super-injunction would still be imposed two years on.
Eventually, a whole cluster of news organisations joined the battle including The News Agents’ podcast, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Financial Times and the Press Association.
The public can have no confidence in justice if it is delivered in secret.
But this wasn’t just about upholding the Scott vs Scott open justice principle from more than a century ago. It was also about protecting the fundamental right of government scrutiny. This secret scheme could end up costing billions, all of which has been agreed without a single parliamentary debate.
In his judgment, in which he removed the super-injunction, Mr Justice Chamberlain was almost congratulatory of the media for keeping it under wraps for so long – the “super” element of the order prevents even the mention of the existence of the order and the proceedings.
He wrote: “For the last year, my assumption has been that the injunction might fall to be discharged when the information protected by it leaked into the public domain through the media in the UK or abroad…. It is one of the many remarkable features of the litigation—and very much to the credit of the media organisations and individual journalists involved—that there has been no mention in the media of the underlying matters while the super-injunction remained in force.”
Given that breaking a super-injunction is contempt of court which could result in an unlimited fine, jail or having your assets seized, it is no real surprise that it didn’t leak out.
But for all its faults, some public appreciation is required of the media’s persistence over the past two years in overturning this super-injunction. Without them being the eyes and ears of the public, then it might not have ever come out.
In his judgment, it’s clear that Mr Justice Chamberlain was uneasy with the super-injunction.
He said he had “serious free speech concerns” from the outset “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”.
In fact, he decided more than a year ago to lift the super-injunction but this was blocked by the Court of Appeal. Closer scrutiny will now be given of that decision as well as the initial assessment provided by the government two years ago.
The continuing fall-out of this could be huge.
Paul Magrath, Head of Product Development and Online Content at the Incorporated Council of Law for England and Wales, and Trustee of the Transparency Project, considers how there has been a lack of scrutiny of the judicial process as well as the underlying circumstances that gave rise to the super-injunction.
Absence of scrutiny
Publication at this stage does, at any rate, enable scrutiny of the judicial process. It is not the same scrutiny as would be provided if the hearings themselves had been observed and reported at the time; but as with private hearings in the family courts, publication offers a measure of post-hoc scrutiny which may be considered better than nothing.
The danger in a case such as this, though, is not just the absence of public scrutiny of the judicial process, but also the absence of public and parliamentary scrutiny and debate of the underlying circumstances: the data leak by a government employee, the consequences for those affected, the risks of both disclosure and concealment (as Chamberlain considered, particularly in his second and third judgments) and the debate that might have occurred (but did not) over the measures taken to address the problem.
The data leak
A leak of personal data of this magnitude would normally require urgent and thorough investigation, not only by the body responsible, but also by the relevant regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). The original interim order by Robin Knowles J specified at para 10:
“Nothing in this Order shall prevent the Information Commissioner’s Office [“ICO”] from taking any steps in private that the ICO considers appropriate, but for the avoidance of doubt the ICO is prohibited (without the leave of the Court, which may be sought in writing) from publishing or disclosing externally any information pertaining to the data incident.”
The latter part of that paragraph would explain why we had not heard anything about an ICO investigation till now, but it seems that no such investigation has occurred, nor is one planned. This seems extraordinary. Moreover, as Professor David Erdos points out in a more detailed examination of the ICO’s response (or lack of it) on Inforrm’s blog ( The UK Information Commissioner’s Office and the 2022 Afghan Relocations UK GDPR Data Breach: Regulatory Action Is Necessary) the ICO appears to have taken no part in any of the legal proceedings (unlike the media).
The ICO has issued a statement saying it has “supported the MoD with its internal investigation and carefully considered the specific circumstances under which the breach occurred” and has been “reassured” that the risk of reoccurrence has been “minimised”. In these circumstances, it says, “We are satisfied that no further regulatory action is required at this time in this case.”
In a further statement, Explaining our approach to the MoD data breach, the commissioner himself, John Edwards, essentially said that any more diligent investigation or regulatory action by the ICO would come at the cost of not doing something else, and that (despite the matter having been essentially kept under wraps for the best part of two years) there was nothing the ICO could add to the existing level of public and parliamentary scrutiny.
This seems, as Erdos says, quite feeble. And as data protection specialist Jon Baines pointed out in a post on the Mishcon de Reya website (Data Protection risks to life: Should more be done?), the Commissioner has various other powers available even if a fine is not felt to be appropriate, such as the power, under section 139(3) of the Data Protection Act 2018, to lay a report before Parliament. If nothing else, the egregious nature and consequences of the leak would seem to justify a more robust regulatory response.
Constitutional implications
As Professor Mark Elliott points out on the Public Law for Everyone blog (The Afghan super-injunction case: Some constitutional implications), there are “particular concerns arising when the applicant is the Government, given that”— as Chamberlain J pointed out in his first judgment [2023] EWHC 2999 (KB) at [37] — “the ‘grant of a super-injunction to the Government is likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship. This is corrosive of the public’s trust in government’.”
It also meant that government decisions in dealing with the crisis would take place in the absence of the scrutiny to which government deliberations and decisions were normally subject, “which compromised the axioms that ‘decisions subject to public and Parliamentary scrutiny are not only more legitimate, but are also likely to be better than ones taken in secret’.”
In balancing the pros and cons of continuing the injunction, the judge had to weigh not only the risk to those on the list of exposure of their personal details to others, including most significantly the Taliban, but also the risk to them of not even knowing their details had been compromised in the first place. So there was a balance of potential harms – a sort of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation, in which the government found itself, but also in which the courts were expected to uphold or deny its claims to secrecy.
Chamberlain J’s decision (in his third judgment) to lift the injunction was based in large part on this analysis of relative harms, and Elliott thinks the Court of Appeal was wrong to reverse that decision, effectively allowing the veil of secrecy over the whole affair to continue for another year — a year in which there was a change of government.
Under that changed government the new Defence Secretary, John Healey MP ordered a review, which was conducted by Paul Rimmer – a former senior civil servant and ex-Deputy Director of Chief of Defence Intelligence. He duly reported that the risks were much less than had originally been assessed, whereupon Healey published the review report and ceased to oppose the lifting of the injunction. At that point the whole story came out. But what also came out were a lot of questions about how the government had got into the situation in the first place, and what they had done about it, including the operation of a secret immigration programme to enable many of the Afghans affected by the breach to enter the country. Given the heightened concerns of many over problems with immigration, this was bound to further undermine public trust in the government.
What about Parliament? Elliott points out that in his first judgment (at [16]) Chamberlain J specifically alludes to the fact that the injunction could not bind Parliament, particularly by reference to article IX of the Bill of Rights 1688, since “no such constraint would be constitutional or lawful”. But he pointed out that MPs could not ask about something they had no knowledge of, so “the practical effect of the super-injunction was to prevent Parliament from carrying out its imperative constitutional function of holding Ministers to account in respect of an issue that raised sensitive, complex and costly questions of public policy”.
Even if MPs generally were not informed of the crisis, it might have been something on which an appropriate parliamentary committee should be informed, such as the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) or the Defence Select Committee. The ISC has now announced an inquiry and the Defence Committee has vowed to do so too, no doubt in part to find out why they were both kept in the dark. The only committee that was involved was the Domestic and Economic Affairs sub-committee of the Cabinet, which was responsible for the secret relocation scheme.
Elliott concludes by highlighting the uncomfortable tension between the “horrifying human consequences of permitting the data breach to become known” and the implications of “permitting the Government, for a period of nearly two years, to enact policy, spend vast sums of public money and manage the consequences of catastrophic administrative failure behind an impenetrable veil of secrecy, shielded from all and any public scrutiny and political accountability”.
One might add that the “super” had not initially been sought by the government when applying for the injunction, contra mundum, but also that they did not even apply for it until more than a year after the data breach had occurred, and only then in response to someone posting some of it on Facebook. One talks of coming to Equity with clean hands (an injunction is an equitable remedy), but perhaps there is something about coming to it with vigilant and indeed competent hands too.
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