Lebanon's largest parliamentary party and family members of victims of the deadly 2020 Beirut port blast have renewed calls for international support in the search for justice.
The appeal comes as the domestic investigation remains stalled and less than a month before the third anniversary of the explosion, which killed more than 220 people, injured thousands and caused widespread damage in the Lebanese capital.
It also comes a week before the European Parliament holds a session on the situation in Lebanon.
The blast came after a huge stock of ammonium nitrate – stored at the port for years – caught fire. No reason has been given for it being there and the stalled investigation, which has been repeatedly blocked and undermined by legal challenges, has only compounded the grief.
No senior official has yet been held accountable, with some filing legal challenges against the lead judge, Tarek Bitar, after he sought to question them.
“As it has become quite well known now, justice is being delayed and derailed. Justice delayed is justice unserved,” Ghassan Hasbani, a Lebanese Forces MP for East Beirut and former deputy prime minister, told The National.
He said the call was not trying “to replace the Lebanese judiciary system with an international tribunal”.
Instead they are seeking “resolutions and commitments” from the UN Human Rights Council or the European Parliament to “establish a fact-finding mission to look into breaches of human rights and obstructions of justice in order to name those who are obstructing justice and result in freeing the judicial system from any interference or obstruction in order to continue their work and reach accountability”.
“I want to address now the members of the UN Human Rights Council, not as representatives of the member states, but rather as mothers and fathers,” said Mireille Khoury, who lost her 15-year-old son Elias to the blast and whose daughter Nour was badly injured.
“Can you imagine how we, the mothers and fathers of the victims, are living? How we spend our days and nights? How we spend our lunches and dinners, our Christmas and Easters?
“Can you imagine how much it hurts that we have been relentlessly calling for you to hear our pleas and our agonies, and you are just turning a deaf ear for three years? It's obvious in Lebanon that justice cannot be achieved.”
Ms Khoury was speaking at an event where MPs, family members of the victims and rights groups renewed their call for justice.
Lebanon's judiciary is deeply politicised. Earlier this year, 38 countries issued a joint statement, delivered by Australia at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which voiced concern that the investigation had not been concluded and had been “hampered by systemic obstruction, interference, intimidation”.
Mr Bitar reopened the case in January when he charged senior politicians, judicial figures and security officials in connection with the explosion.
But soon after, Lebanon’s top prosecutor told Mr Bitar that the investigation was still on hold and charged him with rebelling against the judiciary.
The explosion is regarded as a symptom of decades of mismanagement and corruption in Lebanon, which has also led to a devastating economic collapse.
The Lebanese Forces, a Christian-led party that evolved from a civil war militia, leapfrogged traditional rival the Free Patriotic Movement to become the largest party in the 128-seat parliament after legislative elections in 2022.
No faction holds a majority in the deeply divided parliament. The Lebanese Forces have 19 MPs.
