Judicial Scrutiny, Parliamentary Accountability and the Afghan Superinjunction 2

SENDING an email, only to realise it has been misdirected or includes sensitive, superfluous material, is the sort of anxiety-inducing administrative mishap with which most people can identify.But few such errors have consequences as calamitous as those that occurred when an official mistakenly attached to an email an enormous dataset containing the details of Afghans who, having assisted the UK Government during its military presence in Afghanistan, had applied to settle in the UK.The resulting possibility of the dataset's ending up in the hands of Afghanistan's Taliban regime endangered thousands of lives, necessitating an emergency relocation scheme that may end up costing several billion pounds.Amid concern that publicity would heighten the risks created by the data breach, the Ministry of Defence, in September 2023, obtained from Robin Knowles J. not only the injunction, restraining disclosure of the data breach, it had requested, but an apparently unprecedented superinjunction contra mundum, imposing a worldwide prohibition on disclosure of the injunction's existence.In a series of judgments, Chamberlain J. reviewed the superinjunction.