A super-injunction has been revealed

16th July 2025

A curious sequence of court judgments have just been published

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Yesterday a raft of court judgments and other legal materials were published in respect of an extra-ordinary super-injunction.

And this was not just a super-injunction, it was also one against the world – contra-mundum.

This is heady stuff.

You can read the materials here.

I do not offer any quick hot-take as these things should be read properly, but at first glance they are fascinating.

More to come soon.

12 thoughts on “A super-injunction has been revealed”

  1. It was interesting to hear Ben Wallace, Sec of State at the time, claiming on Radio 4 this morning that he had only asked for an injunction, and that the judge had upgraded it to a superinjunction. That struck me as somewhat implausible. Was it?

    I look forward to your take on the whole matter.

      1. And what DAG has said in today’s FT. It may be true. It is very odd though, isn’t it? Do judges often say to applicants “you can have what you have asked for, but you didn’t ask for enough, so here’s some more”?

  2. The first time the uk government has requested a superinjunction to cover up a mistake. When this is revealed, a new government falls into line and doesn’t criticise the action. They all shake their collective heads and everything is forgiven.

    Never mind the peril of Afghans on the leaked list and their families. No mention of the mess they made of evacuating Afghans who had worked with the UK, left behind and needing a secret route to the UK. The government had known the deadline date the USA had imposed and failed in the resulting chaos.

    1. Not quite. The first *known* time the UK government has used a superinjunction to cover up a serious mistake. By definition, if there were more such superinjunctions active, we wouldn’t know about them.

      When you learn that someone has successfully concealed wrongdoing for a long period of time, the first question you should ask is: how many more instances of wrongdoing have additionally been concealed in the same way and not been found out yet. (For a completely different example: the BBC recently caught MI5 seriously misleading multiple courts over a case involving classified evidence. If they’ve done this and been caught once, how many times have they misled a court and got away with it?)

      1. They very nearly got away with it in the Matrix Chruchill affair where public interest immunity certificates were abused in an attempt to conceal facts which nearly resulted in false convictions. It’s hardly surprising that the same sort of thing is still going on.

  3. Can’t wait for your full analysis!

    In the meantime, a couple of questions from a non-lawyer:
    1) If an injunction forbids (or less often compels) a party to do something, is the point of a super-injunction that it keeps secret what is being forbidden?
    2) Is ‘contra-mundum’ an attempt to prevent the injunction being bypassed by another court as happened, if memory serves correctly,, in the Spycatcher case with publication in Australia?

    If you could clarify these points in the course of your fuller explanations and analysis, I would be very grateful.

  5. I’m wondering whether somewhere in all this there is a ministerial direction, that significant sums should be spent regardless of the underlying obligations and assessment of liabilities. If there’s not, then it would be instructive to see the various submissions etc prepared by officials.

    It would be helpful if the whole saga could become an open case study, with a wide range of expert contributions, in how to avoid similar problems. I don’t think yet another public inquiry is what we need.

  6. “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly” comes to mind.

    I am quite glad HMG has splashed all this cash to help out people we have ‘dropped in it’. Embarrassing but as a business colleague said – the worst thing is to cover up (especially when it fails).

    Might be interesting to trace the MoD’s activities from that oooerr moment. The thought does occur to me ‘did it suit the MoD to bring back all these people for fear of a worse stink?’ and this ‘mistake’ made a good excuse. Just possibly the rest of HMG might not have been too pleased at the idea and tried some sort of denial/obfuscation. So a bit of hand forcing might have been in order especially if it could be kept quiet until fait accompli.

  7. Yesterday’s article prompted me to try and find out a little bit more about the actual nature of the data leak. How did it happen? Who was responsible? What safeguards *should* have been in place to prevent the disclosure?

    I’m not sure if it helps, but here’s a brief update on what I found, which of course introduces us to another legal front – that of the Data Protection Act and the duty of care that HM Government had as the data custodian of the individuals concerned [though I’m not sure if their nationality will impact the protection afforded them under the law].

    The synopsis is that an Officers working at “Special Forces HQ” (one presumes at Credenhill, Herefordshire) asked a soldier to help verify the names of the Afghan nationals who were applying for asylum under the ARAP (Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy).

    The soldier was given a spreadsheet containing 18,000 names of Afghan applicants and then forwarded that spreadsheet to Afghan contacts now based in the UK, to ask for their assistance.

    Curiously, the soldier believed that they had only passed along some 150 names and did not know that the entire database of 18,000-19,000 individuals was contained in the file. I read that it was suggested that the full data set may have been concealed through the use of “hidden rows” or “hidden tabs”.

    It is not clear how the list made its way on to Facebook, but it seems reasonable to assume that one or more of the UK based Afghans may have been using Facebook to maintain contacts with others still in Afghanistan.

    I want to call out what happened here from a legal perspective, but also from an operational perspective. If it is the case that the soldier had known or had been told that the spreadsheet contained more data than the 150 names they sought to verify, then they are guilty of negligence and likely heading for discipline. However, if the soldier had receive the data “pre-filtered” and been told, “We just need help verifying this list of 150 individuals”, then this talks to a deeper problem with information management and the legal duties of care afforded by law.

    The problem here, if it is the second scenario I set out above, is that what happened in this case [and countless other similar examples] came to pass because an organisation failed to implement “due care”. Not that the soldier did something deliberately wrong – indeed I would go so far as to say that we might consider regarding their involvement along the lines of “There but for the Grace of God go I…”

    But this was Special Forces HQ. Not merely the best-of-the-best of our combat forces, but part of our military for whom confidentiality and stealth are stock-in-trade.

    In other words, I find myself reading the news articles and the posts here and becoming very concered that our ability to safeguard sensitive military secrets might not be all that we’d hope. If events such as these were rare and/or trivial they might not warrant much attention.

    But the fact of the matter is that our government is a prolific leaker of sensitive – sometimes *very* sensitive – information. There’s a shockingly long list here:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UK_government_data_losses

    The question bouncing around in my mind right now is: how come, after all these events, we don’t have better and more rigorously enforced protocols for sensitive data?

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