Unredacted

About the project

Unredacted is a research unit that investigates and documents secretive UK state and corporate practices in the context of national security. Led by Professor Sam Raphael and Dr Jac St John, and building on their earlier work with The Rendition Project, the team undertake in-depth investigations into national security programmes and practices, with a particular focus on covert, clandestine and secretive aspects of the US-UK ‘War on Terror’. 

In February 2024, Unredacted launched with the start of our first major investigation into UK Special Forces war crimes in Afghanistan. This is a multiyear investigation into what appears to have been the systematic mistreatment and unlawful killing of detainees and other unarmed people by UK Special Forces units deployed to Afghanistan, and the subsequent coverup of this criminality by multiple agencies and institutions of the British state. Unredacted’s work on this has already been featured in The Guardian and Politico.

Unredacted’s investigations are underpinned in part by an analysis of thousands of primary documents. Many of these documents are presented in the Unredacted Archive, which provides full access to hundreds of thousands of pages of material, becoming a permanent home for thousands of national security-related documents which have not, until now, been gathered in one place. The Archive will grow significantly and aims to become the UK’s largest permanent, public archive of material relating to national security and human rights.

Funding bodies

This project is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust and MuckRock.