UK Ministry of Justice appeals order to publish convictions by nationality

The UK Government has moved to block the publication of criminal conviction data broken down by offenders’ nationality, prompting accusations from opposition parties and campaigners that ministers are attempting to conceal the scale of foreign national offending.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is appealing a ruling by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), which on June 22, 2026 ordered it to disclose the data following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request submitted by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC), The Telegraph reported.

The think tank requested the total number of convictions in England and Wales between 2018 and 2024, broken down by offenders’ nationality and specific offences, including rape, murder, robbery, weapons offences and drug crimes. The CMC lodged the request in June 2025, meaning the watchdog’s decision followed more than a year of exchanges between the two bodies.

The MoJ argued that producing the data would exceed the cost limit under the Freedom of Information Act and that publishing detailed nationality statistics could, in some cases, risk identifying individuals. The Information Commissioner rejected both arguments.

“The Commissioner acknowledges that the request is wide in scope and involves the manipulation of a complex dataset,” the ICO said in its decision.

“However, complexity alone does not obviate the requirement to provide a properly evidenced estimate.”

The watchdog also dismissed the Ministry’s privacy concerns, noting that any risk of identification could be mitigated by suppressing categories containing fewer than five convictions.

It concluded that the Ministry should “disclose the requested information to the complainant”.

Instead, the government has appealed the ruling to the First-tier Tribunal, delaying publication while the legal challenge proceeds.

Shadow justice secretary Nick Timothy accused Labour of withholding information on politically sensitive crimes.

“Labour have consistently refused to publish sex crime data by nationality, even though we know migrants from some countries are much more likely to be convicted of rape and sexual assault,” he told The Telegraph.

“Why are they trying to appeal against releasing the data? Do Labour just want to cover up the truth about foreign national offenders?”

In a letter to Timothy, justice secretary David Lammy rejected his calls for the full data to be published. He said the MoJ already published a “range of statistical breakdowns” on foreign national offenders and kept publication options under “continuous review”.

An MoJ spokesman said it did not recognise claims of a cover-up. “We are in the process of appealing the ICO’s decision and we do not comment on live legal proceedings,” he added.

Robert Jenrick, the former shadow justice secretary who defected from the Conservatives to Reform UK in January 2026 and now speaks for the party on the economy, also criticised the move.

“The cover-up continues. Successive Tory and Labour justice secretaries have refused to publish this basic information,” he said.

CMC research director Robert Bates, who filed the FOI request more than a year ago, vowed to continue the legal battle.

“It is clearly in the public interest for this information to be released,” he said.

“It is astonishing that the Government is going to the courts in an effort to fight against such important transparency, and raises serious questions as to what they are hiding.”

The detailed figures sought by the CMC would, for the first time, reveal convictions by nationality for individual offences such as rape, child sexual abuse, murder, grievous bodily harm, robbery and weapons offences over a seven-year period.

Campaigners backing disclosure argue that nationality is an important demographic characteristic that should be published, allowing policymakers and the public to identify crime patterns and assess the effectiveness of migration and criminal justice policies.

The issue has gained prominence amid wider debate over foreign national offending in Britain. Ministry of Justice prison statistics consistently show that foreign nationals make up a disproportionately large share of the prison population, accounting for around one in eight prisoners despite representing a substantially smaller share of the overall population.

The CMC has previously published partial figures of its own: an earlier analysis, drawn from separate FOI data, reported more than 100,000 foreign national convictions between 2021 and 2023.

The UK has also faced repeated controversies involving organised Pakistani grooming gangs, while several high-profile Islamist terrorist attacks in recent decades were carried out by foreign nationals or the children of immigrants.

Knife crime, particularly in London and other major cities, has likewise intensified public debate over crime trends and integration.