More than 250 people died and dozens were injured in a fire at the Ali Enterprises textile factory in Karachi, Pakistan, on 11 September 2012. Only three weeks before, Italian auditor RINA Services S.p.A. certified the factory for abiding to international labour standards... ECCHR together with an international coalition of seven other human rights, labour and consumer organizations file a complaint to the OECD National Contact Point (NCP) at the Ministry for Economic Development in Rome against RINA...

“RINA’s clear failure to detect and act upon safety and labour violations in the Ali Enterprises factory once more shows that the social auditing system is inherently flawed...“ ECCHR [...] said.

In a digital simulation of the fire, research agency Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, recently showed that if the factory‘s leniency on safety standards would have been identified and acted upon, hundreds of lives could have been saved.

RINA [...] not only failed to visit the factory itself, but [its] Pakistani subsidiary RI&CA (Regional Inspection & Certification Agency) allegedly also did not set foot in the factory. This subcontractor’s audit failed to notice a range of infractions on the international standards it was upholding...