Emergency Powers and State Secrecy in the British Empire

The British state’s constitutional tradition is to leave flexibility to the ruling elite of the time. Nowhere is this more evident than in the use of emergency powers in Britain’s colonies after the Second World War. Emergency codes allowed for broad discretionary powers to be given to colonial authorities. This led to a prevalence of extrajudicial executions, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, detention without trial or charge and widespread sexual and physical violence. This was capped by broad judicial deference to questions of national security, and official secrecy, whitewash, and a culture of denial. This is illustrated through the example of the Kenyan Emergency in the 1950s. Records of abuses under emergency powers regulations were deliberately expunged, helping to present the United Kingdom’s rule even in the face of rebellion and armed resistance as being marked by ‘minimum force’. In fact, Operation Legacy was a deliberate programme, approved at the highest levels. The UK made it a matter of public policy to erase certain histories of empire through a mass destruction of records which also ensured the British state would be able to dismiss legal challenges brought against it for those abuses it committed as unsupported by evidence.