A recent judgment discharging what is said to be the first superinjunction ever granted ‘contra mundum’ (against the world) has raised a number of issues not just of open justice and transparency (of government, as well as the courts), but also issues of data protection, national security, and freedom of expression.

The court’s decisions

In his judgment given on 15 July 2025 in Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Ltd [2025] EWHC 1806 (Admin), Chamberlain J discharged a superinjunction first granted to the Ministry of Defence on 1 September 2023. The effect of that injunction had been to prevent any reporting not only of the subject matter of the case but also of the very fact of the injunction’s existence. (Hence the “super” nature of the injunction, which was also granted “contra mundum” or against the entire world.)

The subject matter about which reporting was prohibited was a catastrophic data error — the accidental disclosure by a UK government employee of a spreadsheet containing 33,000 records of gravely sensitive personal details relating to almost 19,000 Afghan applicants for relocation to the UK, as well as members of the armed forces and agents working for MI6, following the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan in 2021. This was said to have put up to 100,000 people at grave risk of harm and may even have resulted in some of their deaths. 

The data leak occurred in 2022, but the MOD did not apply for an injunction until August 2023, after part of the dataset had been published on a Facebook page. Although the MOD did not originally apply for a superinjunction, Robin Knowles J decided to grant one, for reasons set out in a written ruling handed down in private on 2 September 2023:  An Application For An Injunction Contra Mundum Brought By The Secretary Of State For Defence. Both that judgment and the order dated 1 September 2023 have now been published via the Judiciary website. 

The interim order had a return date of 1 December 2023 but the matter came back to court in October 2023, before Chamberlain J this time, who heard part of the case in private with an advocate to the court and the representatives of the media organisations present, and part in a closed hearing, from which the media were excluded, pursuant to  CPR 39.2(3), in conditions equivalent to those available under s. 6 of the Justice and Security Act 2013 (which governs closed hearings involving national security information). 

He considered lifting the “super” aspect of the injunction but having decided not to, and to continue it, but keeping it under review, for reasons set out in a judgment dated 23 November 2023 and now published as Secretary of State for Defence v Persons Unknown  [2023] EWHC 2999 (KB). 

Chamberlain J’s next judgment was given in private on 15 February 2024, under the new title Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2024] EWHC 312 (KB). He reviewed the further evidence that had come to light since his earlier judgment, and joined a number of media parties to the proceedings. He also commented on the unique, or at any rate unprecedented nature of the proceedings said to justify a superinjunction, as compared with earlier examples, saying at [30]: 

“The circumstances of this case are 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.”

Carefully balancing the risks, he decided to continue the injunction. 

A further judgment (his third) was given by Chamberlain J on 21 May 2024, Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited  [2024] EWHC 1220 (KB), in which he noted the ‘need to grasp the nettle’ at para 26, saying:

“Now that the evidential picture has become relatively stable, it is important to take a realistic view of the logical end-point of the process if the injunction is maintained – and to ask whether the maintenance of interim relief for such an unprecedented period can be justified.”

He concluded (at para 53) that “In my judgment, the MOD has not shown that the maintenance of the injunction is now justified.” He proposed to discharge it, staying the order subject to any appeal. There was an appeal, on the single ground that the Judge erred by striking the wrong balance between the likely harms associated with maintaining and discharging the injunction. The Court of Appeal, on 26 July 2024, reversed his decision [2024] EWCA Civ 838, saying there had been no material change of circumstances since the earlier judgments, and continued the injunction “subject to periodic review by the High Court” as before. 

The final judgment in the saga was given by Chamberlain J again, on 15 July this year, Ministry of Defence v Global Media and Entertainment Limited [2025] EWHC 1806 (Admin), finally discharging the superinjunction, on the basis of new evidence, and approving the release of the five earlier judgments of the High Court and Court of Appeal. All those judgments were written on the assumption that they would eventually be published. They reflect the anxious scrutiny which the judiciary feel bound to apply when conducting closed hearings and making extreme “gagging” orders of this nature. In his final judgment, Chamberlain J also praised the media parties for their compliance with the superinjunction. 

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. 

There are other examples of scrutiny being applied only after the event, sometimes long after, the most notorious being what used to be a 30-year rule for Cabinet papers, under section 3 of the Public Records Act 1958; now reduced to 20 years under the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010, s 45. There are official secrets which may never be told, or only after a considerably longer period, as we have only learned from a drip-feed of information about moles or double-agents in the secret service. And then there are royal wills, which can be sealed for up to 90 years (previously there was no limit to the period): see Royal wills: unsealing the mystery (Transparency Project). 

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 said 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. 

Further commentary: 

Courts and Tribunals Observers’ Network: A contra mundum super-injunction is discharged after almost two years (including some material reused in the present post)

David Allen Green, Law & Policy Blog: What to know about court orders, injunctions, and super-injunctions

Joshua Rozenberg, A Lawyer Writes: Respecting reporters

Paolo Sandro, UK Constitutional Law Association: Parliamentary democracy under the veil of secrecy: the Afghan leak super-injunction case as a bonfire of constitutional principles

The Times: MoD sought another superinjunction 20 years ago, archives reveal

Featured image: via Shutterstock.