Foreign Office secrecy continues over archive of illegally held files

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/may/11/foreign-office-archive-illegally-held-files

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Last Friday afternoon, 50 historians and archivists piled into the Entente Cordiale room in London's Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). They were there to discuss the fate of hundreds of thousands of historic files dating back to the 17th century, some of which contain damning evidence of murder and torture by British colonial authorities.

In October, the Guardian revealed that the FCO had unlawfully retained millions of historic documents in violation of the Public Records Act at a maximum security compound in Buckinghamshire known as Hanslope Park, which the FCO shares with intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6.

Friday's "records day" was a kind of public airing – to which the public and media were barred from attending – at which FCO officials detailed "plans for the review and release of these legacy records" to the National Archives.

Yet the precedent for this gesture is less-than-inspiring. The FCO held another records day in 2013. But officials at the time vastly understated the size of their repository. The FCO did not acknowledge that, just months earlier, the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, had quietly signed a legal exemption authorising the FCO to retain a staggering 1.2m files at Hanslope Park.

On Friday, FCO officials were asked why they did not disclose this figure last year – when, as early as May 2013, the National Archives website referred to 1.2m "legally retained" FCO files. The officials could not account for this lack of disclosure.

There is another rub. Though the files should be in the public domain, the public and media were barred from Friday's event. This author, a journalist by trade, was ostensibly able to gain entry by virtue of her master's degree in history while a senior Guardian reporter was denied entry. Asked why journalists had not been invited, FCO departmental records officer Robert Deane explained that for "logistical reasons" journalists would receive their own briefing.

The document saga began in 2011, after a group of elderly Kenyans brought a lawsuit against the FCO, claiming damages for abuse they suffered in colonial times. At the time, the FCO denied that it possessed relevant documents. But in 2012, the office conceded that it was illegally holding 1,500 Kenyan files

at Hanslope Park. Later, the government revised that to 20,000 colonial-era files, covering 37 former colonies. Those files have since been released to the National Archives. They contain information on varied subjects, including: the 1850s Crimean war and a British plot (never carried out) to test virulent poison gas in Botswana in 1943.

Only last year did the government admit that the colonial files were just one small part of a massive archive at Hanslope Park. The FCO initially estimated that the so-called "special collections" contained 250,000 files. That estimate was changed to 1.2m, and then 600,000.

On Friday, FCO officials insisted that the discrepancy was due to a "rounding error", and difficulty in counting files of varied size and format.

Pulitzer prize-winning historian Caroline Elkins, who was present at Friday's meeting, said she remained uneasy about the changes. Referring to the 20,000 colonial files (originally estimated at 8,800) that were recently released, she said: "Why didn't you role up your sleeves and count them?"

The FCO maintains that the special collections, which reportedly occupy 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving, had been lost within the caverns of Hanslope Park and then neglected due to limited resources. An investigation commissioned

by the foreign secretary, William Hague, blamed bureaucratic incompetence, but concluded that officials had not acted deceptively.

On Friday, officials said that 60,000 withheld files would be reviewed by 2019. Priority will be given to several file classes, including colonial reports and materials related to second world war-era spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Officials did not indicate when the rest of the estimated 540,000 files would be released.

In an effort to speed the process, the FCO will hire 12 new "sensitivity reviewers", to add to its team of 26 "former senior diplomats" who scrutinise (and sometimes redact) archival material before publication. The FCO says that only 1% of reviewed material is redacted.

One group of prominent academics is considering legal action against the FCO, to secure the Hanslope Park archive. Professor Margaret Macmillan, warden of St Antony's College, Oxford, believes it is not clear the FCO is truly "willing" to release the files promptly.

Near the end of Friday's event, Professor Anthony Badger, the FCO's independent reviewer of the special collections, said he was still "trying to understand the history of this collection, why it came to be".