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A lawyer has urged the Government to reform legal aid eligibility suggesting that if it isn’t there when people need it, laws to protect them are meaningless.
Christian Weaver, who was the barrister in the case of two-year-old Awaab Ishak who died in December 2020 from a respiratory condition caused by “extensive” black mould in a social housing flat he lived in with his parents in Rochdale, opened-up about the tragic case on the Byline Times Podcast. Weaver, who hosts YouTube show The Law in 60 Seconds, also spoke about his new book, Your Right To Protest. Understand It. Use It, which is a guide to making your voice heard without breaking the law.
Following Awaab’s death, ministers Michael Gove and Steve Barclay ordered a review of landlord guidance on the health risks of damp and mould. Gove said Awaab’s death was “a tragedy that should never have occurred in comments that echoed senior coroner Joanne Kearsley, who said in 2023 that the death “should be a defining moment for the housing sector in terms of increasing knowledge, increasing awareness and a deepening of understanding surrounding the issue of damp and mould”. Awaab’s family had been complaining about the issue since 2017. Racism was found to have played a part in the family being ignored.
“The reality is, if the ordinary person can’t afford to take their case to court, not only is it only an illusion, these laws existing, but furthermore, there’s no actual incentive for those with power to actually adhere to the law themselves… There’s a real, deep structural problem here,” Weaver, who works at Garden Court North Chambers, explained.
Awaab’s family’s case was taken on pro bono by Weaver, who told the podcast that “should never be an expectation” for justice to be served. His parents, Faisal Abdullah and Aisha Amin, who were from Sudan and couldn’t speak good English, weren’t automatically entitled to legal aid at the inquest into their son’s death and had they not had it “these changes taking place (Awaab’s Law) would never be happening because there had been no admissions prior to that inquest of any wrongdoing from anybody”.
Awaab’s Law was introduced in the Social Housing Regulation Act 2023 and requires all registered providers of social housing to investigate and fix reported hazards within set timeframes. Labour’s manifesto committed to expanding the scope of Awaab’s law to include all landlords. In February, now Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Labour will expand the law so that “no child has to grow up in homes where mould grows on the walls or water drips from the ceilings”.
Podcast hold, Adrian Goldberg, asked Weaver his thoughts on the proposed Hillsborough Law proposal – named after the football tragedy in Sheffield on 15 April 1989 that claimed 97 lives – which would place a legal duty of candour on public officials during criminal investigations to promote transparency and ethics, and the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974.
Goldberg said, in these instances, public bodies are “lawyered-up” against organisations representing ordinary people “who just don’t have access to the same level of resources… it’s just a fundamental inequality in the law”.
Weaver said it shouldn’t be the case that lawyer’s have to take these cases on pro bono, reading through 1000’s of pages of documents and disclosure “for a revelation to come out… if the organisation know there’s an issue, they should come transparently to the court with that information”.
The pair also spoke about the case of one-year-old Exodus Eyob who fell from a seventh-floor window in a block of flats in Leeds in July 2022 after his mother said she repeatedly raised safety concerns. The case echoed that of another boy in the city, Liam Shackleton, who fell to his death from the eighth floor on 31 May, 2011.
A campaign is currently underway to ensure tenants in high rise property have the automatic right to fixed window restrictions to prevent further tragedies.
Goldberg quizzed Weaver about his book, and the previous Conservative Government bringing in two pieces of “significant” legislation – the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and the Public Order Act – to restrict the right to protest, and how Starmer appeared to have “no appetite” to repeal them.
Weaver said the fact the legislation even exists has a “chilling effect”. “The fact that you can peacefully protest and the law can come down so harshly on you… It deters a person’s willingness to protest”, the lawyer explained, adding that it goes against the Human Rights Act that allows freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly.
One would like to think that the law would be set out to support you in engaging in your human rights, not this chilling effect that might dissuade you from engaging in rights that have been hard fought for and are yours to use
Christian Weaver, lawyer
Weaver added that clampdowns on peaceful protests can lead to “unintended consequences that are actually far worse, and I think that’s worth the Government appreciating as well, that this non violent protest is there for a good reason”.
“It allows people to vent their frustrations, hopefully. It allows Government to properly listen to them. But it actually can prevent things much more disruptive happening in society,” he said.
Goldberg asked Weaver how people “might protest in other ways” to avoid falling foul of the law.
The lawyer encouraged online activism, using the Freedom of Information Act to access and reveal key information and launching petitions.
“Something I’ve been really keen to do in the book is avoid labelling people as protesters, because there might be people that… that label doesn’t sit right with them. And actually, there are ways that you know don’t mean you have to identify as an activist or protester, but there are ways you can make your voice heard, for it to have impact, and this book seeks to help people do that.”
Weaver concluded by saying that if people mobilise and represent as voting blocks, politicians “will therefore think we can’t actually ignore this group… and hopefully it can bring about pressure and positive changes can be made”.
People-power is something Weaver learned early on as a child shaped by racism in Nottingham during the early 90s when the racially-targeted murder of Stephen Lawrence shocked the nation.
Weaver’s grandparents were repeatedly “subjected to racist attacks, weekly”. People put feces on their car and outside their home, so “when they enter the car or touch the car, there’d be feces there, and they’re trying to step out the property, there’d be feces”, he recalled, adding: “I always caveat it with, ‘it’s my childhood memory’, but some things just stick out so strongly they have had this impact.”
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Weaver’s family contacted the police, but nothing was done. So, his grandfather, a church leader, put a placard outside their home saying, “this family will not be intimidated by racists”.
“And in that moment, I learned so much about society, life, power, dynamic, power structures,” Weaver told the podcast.
“I learned from a young age that people, when they stand up for themselves, can stop things happening.”
The work he’s done since “has had that people power, and protest, in a large part… perhaps born out of those earliest experiences” and has been propelled by the belief that you “can’t necessarily wait for anybody else to do it for you, so you start it”.