The new generation of secret courts that the government is proposing could hear cases based upon historic allegations from Britain's colonial past, officials have confirmed.

With the high court ruling that three veterans of Kenya's Mau Mau rebellion can sue the British government over the abuses suffered more than 50 years ago, large numbers of similar cases are anticipated by government lawyers.

Thousands more in Kenya are thought to be considering claims, while in Cyprus, veterans of the Eoka insurgency who were imprisoned and allegedly tortured by British forces in the 1950s are also reported to be planning legal action against the British government.

Both the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Justice say the controversial closed material procedures (CMPs) that lie at the heart of the justice and security bill could be employed to prevent public disclosure of evidence that was deemed to be potentially damaging to national security or the national interest.

A Cabinet Office spokesman said: "If sensitive national security evidence is relevant then a test for CMP would be applied."

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said: "The intention is that the proposals would extend to all civil litigation cases where release of pertinent information would be damaging to the national interest."

The Cabinet Office pointed out that no attempt had been made to withhold evidence in the Mau Mau case on national security grounds. However, most of the documentary evidence in that case remained hidden until historians working for the claimants' lawyers discovered the existence of a secret archive of colonial-era files that the Foreign Office had stored in a high-security government communications centre at Hanslope Park, 55 miles north of London.

The Mau Mau veterans' lawyer, Martyn Day, said: "The British government has been responsible for numerous outrages over the last five to six decades. The British courts have determined in the Mau Mau case that it is right and just for our government to be held to account for those actions. Any attempt to try and use some tricky manoeuvre to escape justice would be seen by the world for the despicable act it would be."

On Monday, Amnesty International published a heavily-critical report about the bill's proposals. The organisation condemned the bill as Kafkaesque and feared it would enable governments to "simply play the 'national security' card whenever it wants to keep things secret".

While the government stresses that CMPs will be used only to protect national security, there is some evidence to suggest that the UK's intelligence and security agencies regard the disclosure of information that damages their own reputations as a potential threat to national security. One joint MI5 and MI6 interrogation policy document produced in 2006, for example, warns that the disclosure that "information will be or has been obtained through the mistreatment of detainees" could result in "damage to the reputation of the agencies, leading to a reduction in the agencies' ability to discharge their functions effectively".

CMPs – which are already used in terrorism-related immigration tribunals – allow government lawyers to rely on evidence that cannot be seen by victims or claimants, and cannot be challenged by their lawyers. The evidence can be seen by security-vetted barristers known as special advocates, but they cannot discuss what they have seen with the claimants, with the result that most regard the system as inherently unfair.

Some human rights activists go further, saying the government is attempting to codify a cover-up of recent crimes or misdeeds, and attempting to ensure that UK complicity in torture and rendition will in future be concealed.

No date has been set for the bill's next stage in the House of Lords, when peers will vote on the controversial measures. Labour, which says it remains "unconvinced" of the need for reform, is understood to be asking for extra time to be made available for debate.