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In 2009, a reporter at The Guardian, in the UK, obtained a preliminary scientific report that Trafigura, a trading company, had commissioned a few years earlier, after a contractor for the firm dumped tons of allegedly toxic waste in the African nation of Côte d’Ivoire. When The Guardian approached Trafigura about the report, it responded by taking out what is known as a “superinjunction”—a mysterious mechanism that not only blocked The Guardian from covering the report, but from saying that it was blocked from covering the report. A few days later, WikiLeaks published the report online. Shortly after that, Paul Farrelly, a journalist turned lawmaker with the governing Labour Party, mentioned the superinjunction in Parliament; he was protected in doing so by a form of legal immunity for lawmakers. The existence of the order was now public—but, extraordinarily, lawyers for Trafigura insisted that it still applied, gagging The Guardian from reporting something that had happened in a national legislature. (“Guardian gagged from reporting parliament,” the paper wrote in a headline, before suggesting that the situation appeared to jeopardize free-speech protections dating back to 1688.) In the end, outraged readers spread Farrelly’s question all over Twitter, as it was then known, and Trafigura relented. “Trafigura thought it was buying silence,” Alan Rusbridger, then the editor of The Guardian, wrote at the time. “A combination of old media—The Guardian—and new—Twitter—turned attempted obscurity into mass notoriety.” (Incidentally, ICYMI, we interviewed Rusbridger on CJR’s podcast last week.)

This was likely not the first superinjunction—though by their nature, they are hard to keep track of—but it was the first time that the concept blew up as a national scandal in the UK. It would not be the last. Unlike Trafigura’s, most of those that followed (again, that we know of) sought to gag reporting—and to gag the gag order—about celebrities’ alleged romantic affairs, as The Guardian noted in 2011. That year, a different lawmaker used his parliamentary perch to name a senior banker and a well-known soccer player who were reported to have taken out superinjunctions. (Around the same time, Ravi Somaiya, then of the New York Times and later of CJR, reported that a group of journalists had closely listened in to crowd chants at a soccer game in the hope that one of them might reference a player’s alleged affair that was all over the internet, thus providing them with a “circuitous way of covering the story.”) Even a high-profile journalist—Andrew Marr, then the host of a long-running Sunday show on the BBC—admitted that he had taken out a superinjunction a few years earlier to suppress reports of an extramarital relationship, only to eventually have a change of heart. (“I did not come into journalism to go around gagging journalists,” he said. “Am I embarrassed by it? Yes. Am I uneasy about it? Yes.”) The same year, a report by top judges concluded that superinjunctions had been granted overly regularly, but said that they were now rarer and more controlled, and that the press should have the chance to contest them.

Even during this period of controversy, it might have seemed unthinkable that the British government would itself take out a superinjunction. Fast-forward a decade and a half to last week, however, and that has now been revealed to have happened. The story begins in 2021, when the US and allies including the UK withdrew their troops from Afghanistan as the country fell to the Taliban. The British government, now run by the Conservative Party, set up a resettlement program for Afghans who had worked with British officials during the occupation and might now be vulnerable to Taliban reprisals. In 2022, a soldier tasked with vetting applications shared a spreadsheet with Afghan contacts; the soldier apparently thought they were sharing a limited sample of names for verification purposes, but in reality, some nineteen thousand names were hidden in the document—including, it transpired, those of British secret-service and intelligence personnel whose identities are supposed to be closely protected. In 2023, the government learned that the database had been compromised after its existence was publicized in an Afghan Facebook group. Officials responded by setting up a secret new scheme to resettle people on the list who might now be at risk, even if they might not otherwise have been eligible. The government also applied for an injunction to stop the media from reporting on the leak, citing the safety threat.

The government applied for an injunction, without the “super”—but a judge decided not only to grant the request, but to upgrade it, meaning, once again, that reporters aware of the leak could not only not report it but also couldn’t talk about the fact they couldn’t report it. Initially, the superinjunction was supposed to last for only a few months. But the government fought to extend it; a different judge said no, but was overruled on appeal. Last summer, Labour returned to power. The new government once again applied to extend the superinjunction—but it also commissioned a review, which ultimately found that there was little evidence to suggest that the Taliban had targeted the people on the list, and that it was likely already in possession of ample information with which to target them if it wanted to. And so, last Tuesday, the superinjunction was finally lifted, and news of the leak finally got out.

Officials from the past Conservative government have since defended their handling of the story. Ben Wallace, the defense minister who first learned of the leak, noted that he had only applied for a “normal” injunction, and that he had been justified in doing so because reporting the story would have put people in danger. (“It was not, as some are childishly trying to claim, a cover-up,” he said.) Grant Shapps, who succeeded Wallace in the post and pushed to keep the superinjunction in place, likewise said that he had been justified in erring on the side of “extreme caution.” But Johnny Mercer, an outspoken former lawmaker who served as a minister for veterans’ affairs in the Conservative administration (and is himself a veteran), broke ranks, blasting the Afghan resettlement process as “the most hapless display of incompetence by successive ministers and officials that I saw in my time in government,” and suggesting that the superinjunction wasn’t necessary since “everyone, including the media, seemed to know about” the leak already. (“Officials seemed to get a bit of a kick out of something being ‘Top Secret,’” Mercer alleged.) John Healey, the current Labour defense minister, told lawmakers that withholding the leak had made him feel “deeply uncomfortable.” He added in an interview, “You cannot have democracy with superinjunctions in place.”

Many of those kept in the dark would seem to agree. They included the chair of a parliamentary intelligence committee, who questioned why the leak had been kept from its members since they routinely handle classified material. (“I think there are serious constitutional issues here,” the chair said. Yesterday, the committee announced an inquiry into the leak.) And various journalists have addressed the press-freedom implications of the superinjunction. “In practical terms, this meant if I told my husband about it, or my parents, or colleagues, then I could end up in prison,” Larisa Brown, the defense editor at The Times of London, who was subject to the order, told the BBC last week. “It was pretty worrying.” Frank Gardner, a security correspondent at the BBC, noted growing questions as to whether the superinjunction was taken out for safety reasons alone. The Guardian warned, in an editorial, that a “dangerous precedent has been set.”

Perhaps the most detailed account of the process behind the superinjunction came from Lewis Goodall, a former BBC journalist who now cohosts The News Agents, a popular podcast launched by two other BBC exiles. Goodall heard about the leak from a source in 2023; he hadn’t planned to report on it without first consulting with the defense ministry, but was read the riot act regardless. At the time, Goodall had objected to the superinjunction, but his “angst was modest,” he recalls; he figured that the order would be a time-limited and reasonable measure to relocate those at risk. As time passed, however, and the order remained in place, he came to think that it “was no longer about getting people out, but keeping the story in,” and that he had entered “what felt like an endless kafkaesque nightmare.” The Conservative government, then in its death throes, was flailing, not least on the subject of immigration; “Was it conceivable or credible,” Goodall wondered, “that politics was not playing a major role in the decision making?” Whatever their rationale, he concludes, officials essentially got to make that decision for themselves—and the leak has only now come to light because a different government decided that it should. “For all of its problems, this could never have happened in the United States, with its first amendment rights, and constitutionally bound freedom of expression,” Goodall writes. As the superinjunction process unfolded, he asked himself: “What else might be hidden because it was inconvenient and difficult in the years ahead? Was I sitting through something when Britain became a different country? Or, more disturbingly, where I realised and saw properly, the country as Britain really was?”

At surface level, this whole episode looks like the latest iteration of the age-old ethical conundrum as to how the press ought to balance the risks of disclosing potentially dangerous information against the costs of secrecy—one that is always fraught and only realistically resolvable on a careful, case-by-case basis. Look deeper, though, and that argument might be a red herring here. Governments have various means at their disposal—starting with a sincere effort at persuasion—to encourage news organizations not to report material that could credibly endanger lives; taking out not only an injunction, but a superinjunction—and then stretching that out for two years—is a nuclear option, and an unacceptable one for officials to be able to wield given the obvious temptation to use it to cover up embarrassments, whether or not that’s what actually happened here. Superinjunctions are bad enough in the hands of multinational corporations and soccer stars. Government usage does, indeed, set a scary new precedent.

And this is assuming that there was a bulletproof case to keep the existence of the leaked Afghanistan database secret, which is far from clear. The risks of Taliban reprisals were, and are, very real. But an official review has now found that those risks weren’t as major as first thought. And even earlier, as Goodall notes, there were live questions as to whether the Taliban might already have access to the database, and if so, what the best course of action would be—questions that in-the-know journalists were apparently able to put to government representatives, but entirely outside the glare of democratic accountability. Appearing on the BBC last week, Brown, of The Times, was asked whether she hadn’t worried, in challenging the superinjunction on public-interest grounds, that disclosure might harm vulnerable people in Afghanistan. “What I was worried about,” she countered, is that the superinjunction meant “none of these Afghans knew that their data had been breached, that this list was out there, that the Taliban might have it already, and that at any point the Taliban could come knocking at their door and kill them. And I believed that the Afghans had the right to know so they could take measures into their own hands.”

Indeed, the other outrage here, beyond the obvious press-freedom issue, is how the countries that occupied Afghanistan have subsequently treated those they worked with, put at risk, then left behind. As I’ve written before, the plight of those people (including journalists) has too often been erased from subsequent news coverage—on both sides of the Atlantic—and the superinjunction looks, in a sense, like one more act of erasure, this time state-enforced, under the arrogant pretense that it’s for their own good. Goodall writes that he had been surprised to learn, months after the superinjunction went into effect, that the Conservative government hadn’t proposed to get all that many exposed individuals out of Afghanistan. More were eventually resettled. But earlier this month, before news of the superinjunction became public, the new Labour government shuttered the publicly available pathways to new applicants. It did so without prior warning, and with barely any publicity. The story certainly did not get as much coverage as the subsequent leak news did, though it did get some. Holly Bancroft, a journalist at The Independent who was also affected by the superinjunction, covered the development at the time. One campaigner told her that it left “people, including the children and families we support, in dangerous situations with no hope of rescue.”

I wrote above that the story of the Afghan leak and subsequent superinjunction began with the withdrawal in 2021, but perhaps that’s wrong—perhaps, as with the story of superinjunctions themselves, we need to look back further for clarity, to the 2000s, when a past Labour government leaped into the George W. Bush administration’s war in Afghanistan in the first place. I’ve been frustrated, over the years, that Bush’s name has often been left out of media coverage of the mess surrounding the withdrawal, since the invasion practically guaranteed some sort of mess somewhere down the line, and was thus unavoidable context for the story. After the leak and superinjunction came to light, Simon Jenkins, a columnist at The Guardian, made a similar case, albeit with the name of Tony Blair, then Britain’s prime minister, in place of Bush. “The lesson of the leak is not that emails are never safe. That surely is known,” he wrote. “The real lesson is that Britain should never have spent a quarter of a century trying to impose its rule on Afghanistan in the first place. Will it now learn?” This much we were never barred from asking.

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