Unclear if reprisals in Afghanistan after data breach says Labour peer

We spoke to Labour peer Helena Kennedy, who arranged the evacuation of more than 500 people from Afghanistan in 2021 and is still in contact with many in the country.

Jackie Long: Baroness Kennedy, there has been one devastating revelation after another on this data breach. Today, this fact that personal data of serving and former members of the Special Forces. What do you make of it?

Helena Kennedy: Well, I mean, I’m shocked. It doesn’t surprise me, because I know, and because of the ways in which asylum applications are made and under these special schemes, you had to have support and proof that you were someone who had done work for the British Army in occupation in Afghanistan. You had to show that you’d had links to British government officials, that you had been their interpreters, and so on. And you needed to have support, support of evidence from those individuals. And so it’s not a surprise that it should be in a spreadsheet of applications that were being made. However, the idea that such applications could find their way into the public domain, because of some error of pressing the wrong button on a computer, is really alarming. And that they weren’t encrypted, that there wasn’t great care taken with that kind of information.

I mean, Jackie, I can tell you that when I evacuated my… women lawyers and judges and so on, with their families, their husbands, who often were themselves lawyers who had worked in the justice system. Often, I mean, they had children and so-on. When I got them out, I was helped by the very people that we’re talking about, people who worked for our intelligence community, people who helped me make contact with people who could help me on the ground in Afghanistan, getting the women from Kabul and other cities, up to Mazar-e-Sharif, where I had chartered aeroplanes to get people out. And all I can tell you is that it wouldn’t have been possible without those people. And the risk to them now is a shock. And I do think that there’s something wrong with the system that allowed someone to have that material and to so easily, by pressing the wrong button, send it out into the ether, and put people at risk.

“The idea that such applications could find their way into the public domain, because of some error of pressing the wrong button on a computer, is really alarming.”
– Baroness Helena Kennedy

Jackie Long: Exactly that point. You raise the issue of risk, and that is at the heart of all of this, isn’t it? If you look at the question about the risk to the Afghans, now the risk to serving and former members of the Special Forces, how do you assess the level of risk?

Helena Kennedy: Well, I was very helped at the time by assessing the risk of the women lawyers, the women judges, and it was our security services, our intelligence agencies, that were able to tell me that the women were particularly at risk because they had often sentenced people who were Taliban people. Two women judges on the Supreme Court had been assassinated only at the beginning of the very year of the evacuations. So we knew that that was the case. And let me just tell you. I’m now in touch with many of the family members of those women who remain in Afghanistan. I’m still in touch some of the judges who are in hiding. They do not feel that they are without risk. They are still fearful of reprisals.

Richard Bennett, who is the rapporteur for the UN on Afghanistan, is someone I’ve worked with on all of this. And he would say that because of the breakdown of civil society in Afghanistan, the organisations and NGOs and the UN not being able to have a proper presence there, we just don’t have the documentation to tell us whether reprisals might be taking place, which people are not able to speak to. And so I’m not as satisfied as the report is that reprisals are now over. Why would you think that they were over? And to family members of people who’ve got out.

Watch more here:
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