Grenfell report: a fire fuelled by a human rights crisis

Alice Johnson, IBA Multimedia JournalistWednesday 2 October 2024

Just before 1am on 14 June 2017 a fridge-freezer on the fourth floor of a 1950s council block in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs caught alight. Within minutes the fire broke out through the kitchen window and ripped through the exterior of the building, quickly spreading into the homes of residents on higher floors. As a result, 72 people, including 18 children, died. The chair of a public inquiry into the disaster would later describe the deaths as ‘avoidable’.

The Grenfell Tower fire devastated a local community and left a lot of unanswered questions. Theresa May, the then-prime minister, ordered a public inquiry into the disaster, led by retired Court of Appeal judge Sir Martin Moore-Bick, to examine its causes and the failings that turned a small flat fire into an uncontrollable blaze. Seven years after the UK government announced the inquiry its second and final report was published in September. 

The findings in the report are stark and raise serious human rights concerns that have already been identified in the events surrounding the fire. In 2019 the Equality and Human Rights Commission found following a separate inquiry into the disaster that the government and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea had violated the right to adequate housing and residents’ rights to life, including by allowing Grenfell Tower to be wrapped in highly combustible materials and failing to make reasonable adjustments for the disabled and vulnerable groups, such as pregnant women and children, to escape in the event of an emergency. About 40 percent of the building’s disabled or vulnerable residents died in the fire.

Human rights impacts do not explicitly feature in the limited scope Moore-Bick chose for the public inquiry, yet the report tells a story of decades of government indifference towards fire safety and a social housing system that ignored repeated complaints from residents about fire risks and ‘lost sight of the fact that the residents were people who depended on it for a safe and decent home and the privacy and dignity that a home should provide’.

Aoife Nolan, an international human rights academic at the University of Nottingham, says that despite the report not engaging with the language of human rights directly, breaches of the right to life, adequate housing and equality in the events surrounding the fire are obvious. ‘The human rights impacts are wide ranging […] you can take the report findings and map them straight on to a human rights framework and identify clear problems there,’ she says.

In 2018 the then-UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Leilani Farha, visited the UK to meet the Grenfell community. She expressed concerns that the government may have breached international human rights standards on housing safety, and this could have been a factor in the outbreak of the fire. She asked the government to formally participate in the inquiry but was rejected.

Farha says it’s unfortunate that the UK government decided against using a human rights framework for the inquiry because it fits ‘squarely’ with understanding the events surrounding the fire and how to prevent similar horrors from occurring. ‘The final report is a thorough exposé of what happens when a system fails to take seriously the human right to housing,’ she says.

Mark Stephens CBE, co-chair of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute, says that historically public and commercial landlords haven’t thought about the human rights of residents when providing homes. He says the report may change behaviour but that the cost of raising standards will ultimately be passed down to the consumer.

In the report Moore-Bick describes the council’s immediate response to the fire as ‘muddled, slow’ with certain aspects demonstrating a ‘lack of respect for human decency and dignity’ with many feeling ‘abandoned by authority and utterly helpless.’ People with particular social or religious needs suffered ‘a significant degree of discrimination’, Moore-Bick says. The inquiry, blaming time pressures, did not examine questions of potential discrimination in social housing, however, despite submissions from lawyers acting for survivors and the bereaved that racism may have had a role in why a disproportionate amount of people who lived and therefore died at Grenfell Tower were from ethnic minority groups. 

Imran Khan KC, who made such submissions, believes the inquiry let victims down by failing to examine whether prejudice towards race, class or disability caused residents to be placed in inadequate homes and impacted their treatment on the night of the fire. ‘When the inquiry started what we wanted them to look at is, how it came to be that in this rich country, this rich borough, there appeared to be a systemic problem in terms of discrimination,’ he says.

The inquiry report also paints a damning picture of a fraudulent and irresponsible construction industry, inadequately policed and enabled by a government that prioritised commercial interests over public safety. Moore-Bick says the companies that manufactured the deadly cladding and insulation used to refurbish Grenfell Tower engaged in ‘deliberate and sustained strategies to manipulate the testing process, misrepresent test data and mislead the market’.

Michael Mansfield KC, a human rights barrister who represents bereaved families affected by the fire, says that the anti-red tape agenda between 2010 and 2016 created an environment where corporate wrongdoing could flourish. ‘It was a situation in which respect of basic human rights were lost in a quagmire of profit before people,’ he says.

Grenfell United, an advocacy group made up of the families of victims and survivors of the fire, said in a statement that the report is ‘a significant chapter in the journey to truth, justice and change’ but justice has not yet been delivered. ‘The inquiry report reveals that whenever there’s a clash between corporate interest and public safety, governments have done everything they can to avoid their responsibilities to keep people safe,’ the group said. ‘The system isn’t broken, it was built this way’.

Seven years on the CPS is yet to make any charging decisions, and any trials are not expected until 2027.

Natalie Oxford/Wikimedia Commons

Human rights: is Iran the world’s worst executioner?

Emad Mekay, IBA Middle East CorrespondentWednesday 2 October 2024

Iran has recently engaged in a spree of executions, including 29 killings in one day. The development has prompted warnings from international rights advocates that, due to a lack of legal guarantees or due process, dozens more could find themselves on death row.

Iran Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation that tracks the country’s use of capital punishment, says there’s been an increase of over 100 executions in August, bringing the total in the first eight months of the year to 418, a significant increase on 2023. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an opposition group in exile based in France and Albania, since President Masoud Pezeshkian took office at the end of July, there have been 214 executions. Rights groups suggest that, if this continues, Iran will earn the dubious title of ‘world’s worst executioner’.

Of the executions carried out in August, 46 were for drug-related charges, 50 for murder, three for rape and one for the national security-related charges. New York-based Human Rights Watch noted that there were 29 executions reported in one day in August. Iran also undertook the first public execution this year, hanging 21-year-old man Amirreza Ajam Akrami, in the central city of Shahrud. 

‘I don't think any country has such persistence when it comes to the use of the death penalty,’ says Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, Director of Iran Human Rights. 

Anne Ramberg is IBAHRI Co-chair and Immediate Past Secretary General of the Swedish Bar Association. ‘Clearly, the death penalty is being used as a tool of repression to create fear and to attempt to silence, protestors and dissidents,’ she says. ‘We condemn unreservedly death sentences and executions and demand the abolition of both in Iran.’

Iranian anger at UN

In July, the outgoing Special Rapporteur on situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Javaid Rehman, issued a scathing report saying that Iranian officials had committed some of ‘the worst and the most egregious human rights abuses of our living memory’ since coming to office in 1979 particularly in the early 1980s. In the report, Rehman argues that such crimes are tantamount to ‘crimes against humanity and genocide against the nationals of their own state.’ 

The report noted that the same rationale used during the inception of the Iranian revolution was still responsible for Iran’s patchy legal record, particularly the broad use of national security offences such moharebeh (war against God) ) and efsad-e fel-arz (spreading corruption on Earth) – two terms of religious connotations that are particular to the ruling Iranian mullahs. 

The report prompted angry reaction in Iran with Iranian officials going as far as accusing Rehman of complicity in terrorism after he attended a meeting in Paris of the Iranian opposition group, the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI). Kazem Gharibabadi, the Secretary of Iran's High Council for Human Rights, said Rehman's report was ‘full of lies and baseless accusations.’ Rehman said on the contrary he conducted his job away from politics.

‘I am greatly honoured to have served for six years as the Special Rapporteur. I worked on the Iran mandate on a completely unpaid basis, acting with great integrity and absolute commitment and in an independent capacity, completely impartially, professionally and free from any politicizations,’ he says. ‘I played an important role in reporting human rights violations and led several accountability campaigns including one for the establishment of the historic UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission in November 2022.’

Tehran also denies committing any rights violations and argues that defendants in Iranian courts are tried, and potentially executed, only for serious crimes related to ‘premeditated murder,’ ‘drug-related charges’ and for ‘rape’ in fair and transparent trials.

Numbers tell a worrying story though. Tehran executed at least 834 people in 2023, more than each of the previous seven years, making the country responsible for 74 per cent of all recorded executions worldwide, according to Amnesty International. The UN says that, in 2022, 582 were executed, a 75 per cent increase from the previous year, which saw 333 executions.

Over the past 14 years, there has been a total of more than 8,200 executions in Iran, according to the Iran Human Rights. ‘That is one to two executions every single day,’ says director Amiry-Moghaddam. ‘It gives an average of more than 600 yearly executions.’ 

Richard Goldstone, Honorary President of the IBAHRI tells Global Insight, that Iran was evidently using the death penalty as retribution for political activism. ‘Clearly this use of the death sentence is calculated to intimidate freedom of expression and political activism,’ he says. ‘This is a political excuse and there can be no doubt that the death sentence is calculated to instil fear in those who oppose the autocratic regime.’

Calls for immediate reform

Abolitionist supporters, who oppose the death penalty because of its inherent cruelty, have urged Iran to stop escalating the use of the death penalty and spare lives. Among their demands is an immediate reform of the country’s judiciary because of the country’s notorious absence of separation of powers. 

Giada Girelli, senior analyst at Harm Reduction International, notes that Iran has so far faced few or no international consequences for its maximum punishment policy. ‘Despite some words of condemnation, mostly by UN human rights mechanisms, other actors – such as fellow governments and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime  - are mostly silent,’ she says. ‘The geopolitical context is also different, meaning the death penalty may simply not be a priority in the diplomacy with Iran. All this implicitly sends a signal to Iran that executions can continue, with no political consequences.’

In his report, Rehman called upon the international community to establish an investigative and accountability mechanism to probe crimes under international law with a view to future criminal prosecution of perpetrators in Iran. He says the mechanism should examine what he called ‘atrocity crimes’, including ‘summary, arbitrary and extra-judicial executions’.

‘I have called for an investigative and accountability mechanism which would investigate and examine all the available evidence as presented in my report and in the UN documentation and other sources, including evidence from the witnesses,’ Rahman says. ‘This evidence would then be available to be used for future criminal prosecutions of the perpetrators of international crimes.’

Amiry-Moghaddam of Iran Human Rights says the international community needs to ratchet up its campaign against the death penalty. ‘The only means that can be used is naming and shaming these regimes that still use the death sentence and, if possible, for sanctions to be imposed on those governments that use the death sentence to intimidate its citizens into compliance,’ says Amiry-Moghaddam.
 

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