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The Foreign and Commonwealth Office migrated archives are sensitive and incriminating collections of documents from Britain's former colonial governments that were sent back to the UK (hence ''migrated'') on the eve of decolonisation for storage in the FCO archives to avoid their disclosure and subsequent embarrassment to Her Majesty's Government. A great many similar documents were not repatriated, but instead destroyed. ==Background== Between 1963 and 1994 the migrated archives were stored in Hayes repository; in 1994 they were moved to Hanslope Park, home of Her Majesty's Government Communications Centre, to save on storage costs. In 1967, in 1974, and again in the early 1980s, Kenya asked for them to be released, but the UK refused. Ben Macintyre of the ''Times'' summarised the procedure for declassifying Foreign Office archival material as follows: Once at Hanslope, reviewing documents for release is a job for 17 part-time "sensitivity reviewers", mostly retired Foreign Office officials; it is rare for a file to be judged sensitive enough to warrant withholding it in entirety.〔 When it came to the migrated archives, however, the question of whether they fell within the scope of the 1958 Public Records Act was never answered definitively, and so they were conveniently left undisturbed in archival stasis.〔 In 2005, two Freedom of Information (FoI) requests were submitted to the FCO by researchers wanting Mau Mau-era government files. The second request was very specific, and did not warrant checking the migrated archives, but the first request should have warranted such a check, yet none was made. More seriously still, in 2006, lawyers for Leigh Day, the legal firm representing former Mau Mau members who were attempting to sue the UK for their torture during the uprising, submitted a Court Disclosure request for "a final tranche of documents relating to the suppression of the Mau Mau" that the government was "refusing to release"; the FCO response explicitly denied the existence of this tranche of documents, i.e. the migrated archives, stating that all information they had held had been transferred to The National Archives (TNA). The Treasury Solicitor's response to Leigh Day went even further, stating that not only were all relevant documents with TNA but that they were also in the public domain. It was only the persistence of a handful of FCO officials, notably Edward Inglett, and a witness statement by Oxford professor David Anderson in December 2010 alleging "systematic withholding by HMG of 1500 files in 300 boxes taking up 100 linear feet", that eventually resulted in the migrated archives coming to light in January 2011. Upon their 'discovery', Foreign Secretary William Hague requested (Anthony Cary ), a former British High Commissioner to Canada, to conduct an internal review into why the migrated archives had been spotlighted neither by the FoI requests nor by the initial Court Disclosure request. Cary reported the following month, and outlined the background as follows: Though sympathetic to the FCO, Cary's report nonetheless judged that despite the involvement of relatively junior staff, who had been genuinely ignorant about the contents of the migrated archives, there were more knowledgeable staff who had not been. Conveniently, in 2006, after the FoI requests came in, the 50-year-old migrated archives were relocated to the section for "FCO material of between 3 and 30 years old". One excuse offered by the FCO for their failure to consult the files was that the ownership of the papers was confused, that the FCO merely possessed stewardship, thus the archives had been considered "out of bounds" for FoI requests (the FCO were not the owners, so they did not have the right to go through the documents). Cary, however, managed to uncover the fact that this was not the case, that there had been "major exceptions to the general principle that these papers have been considered 'out of bounds'." Such an excuse became irrelevant after the 2006 legal request from Leigh Day because ''all'' documents have to be checked when it comes to court cases. "It was perhaps convenient to () that the migrated archives . . . did not need to be consulted for the purposes of FOI requests, while also being conscious of the files as a sort of guilty secret, of uncertain status and in the 'too difficult' tray", Cary concluded. After making Cary's report public in May 2011, Hague declared his "intention to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions"; "the sooner the better", urged David Anderson. Edward Inglett conveyed "sincere and unreserved apologies on the FCO's behalf to both the claimants and the court",〔 and the Foreign Office promised a "process of transparency" and the appointment by Hague of an independent "colonial files tsar" to oversee the release as a matter of urgency. The search that turned up the "lost" documents on Mau Mau revealed a second raft of documents had also been "lost" and, hopefully, also therefore awaited discovery. This second batch included files on: the rebellion against British rule in Cyprus; Special Branch; the Colonial Office's use of witch doctors during Mau Mau; Uganda; Nigeria; and Sierra Leone. This second batch were labelled "Top Secret" and held separately from the other files "migrated" from former colonies, which suggests they contain the most sensitive and incriminating material.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Foreign and Commonwealth Office migrated archives」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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