Alice Hardy, partner in our Public Law and Human Rights team, has spoken to the Financial Times, giving her opinion on the recent Ministry of Defence data breach involving Afghan citizens. Alice has represented Afghan families and says that affected Afghans “should not be abandoned.”

The MoD data breach occurred in February 2022 but was only discovered in August 2023. The data includes the personal details of almost 19,000 people who had asked to come to the UK in order to flee the Taliban.

Alice says:

The suffering of the people endangered by this leak is likely to be immense. Despite this, the government closed the Afghan Relocations and Resettlement Schemes without warning and now it appears they are about to do the same in relation to the secret scheme, when less than 20 per cent of the people affected have been relocated and the leak has still not been successfully contained.

That cannot be right. It was expensive error, but these people have now been put at risk twice by the British government — from working with the UK before the Taliban seized power and as a result of the leak. They should not be abandoned.

The full article is available to subscribers of The Financial Times here.