An ex-Foreign Office civil servant who lost her job after blowing the whistle on the department’s handling of the 2021 evacuation of Kabul has won her case for unfair dismissal.
The Employment Tribunal said the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office unlawfully removed Josie Stewart’s security clearances and unfairly dismissed her in 2022 after she told BBC Newsnight about the department’s handling of the Afghanistan crisis.
In the first case of its kind, the Employment Tribunal ruled that, under whistleblower protection legislation, it can be lawful for a civil servant to share unauthorised information directly with the media.
The tribunal said it was “reasonable for the claimant to go to the UK’s public service broadcaster when the relevant information and/or allegations had already been put into the public domain… and government ministers were publicly disputing them”.
It added: “Was the claimant’s belief that she made the disclosure in the public interest a reasonable belief? The tribunal found that it was. The prime minister and foreign secretary were denying things that the claimant believed to be true, based on what she had observed in the course of her work.”
Stewart said the judgment has achieved her goal of establishing that civil servants "have the right not to stay silent when systemic failures put lives at risk”.
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