The Campaign to End Statelessness in Lebanon
by Kristina Fried, BUSL’20
Since its inception, BUSL’s International Human Rights Clinic (“Clinic”) has worked with civil society organizations across the world to take on projects related to statelessness, refugee law, and forced migration. This year, my colleague Claudia and I piloted a new project for the Clinic, in partnership with the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking, and the Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies. The project ultimately aims to create a network of civil society organizations across the Middle East and North Africa (“MENA”) in a bid to end statelessness in the region. Claudia and I have started in Lebanon, which is home to around 100,000 stateless persons.
Stateless persons are those who are not considered a national by any state. Statelessness puts individuals and sometimes entire groups at a serious disadvantage. Affected populations must overcome substantial legal and administrative hurdles just to access basic human rights and services that others take for granted, like education, healthcare, housing, and employment rights. These disadvantages make stateless persons incredibly vulnerable to long-term, generational marginalization. This is a problem of serious magnitude — in 2017, there were an estimated 10 million stateless across the globe. And it’s not just ‘stateless’ individuals that are vulnerable; people who, for whatever reason, lack valid identity documentation are also at risk of statelessness, as are refugees and migrants who may have difficulty proving their identity due to conditions in their home country and the nature of their displacement.
The 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (“Convention”) was put in place to protect stateless individuals. But only 91 countries have ratified the Convention and are bound by it. And even where countries are bound to abide by the principles set forth in the Convention, those principles often go unimplemented. In 2014, in response to the growing statelessness crisis, the United Nations Refugee Agency (“UNHCR”) launched a global campaign to end statelessness by 2024. The campaign seeks to resolve existing statelessness and prevent the creation of future stateless populations by mobilizing governments and civil society to better identify and protect stateless populations. Civil society actors in most regions of the world have already embraced this strategy and seek to implement it through statelessness networks like redANA in the Americas, the European Network on Statelessness, the Statelessness Network in the Asia Pacific, and the Citizenship Rights in Africa Initiative. The UNHCR campaign and regional civil society networks aim to end statelessness by advocating with states to ensure access to nationality at birth and eliminate gender discrimination in nationality laws, protect stateless migrants, and issue identity documentation to those entitled to it. Claudia and I are using this model to address statelessness in Lebanon by working with government and civil society organizations to identify the populations of concern, both those already stateless and those at risk of becoming stateless, and their overlapping protection needs. While the Clinic’s ultimate goal for this project is to create a MENA-wide network, our short-term goal is to compile this research into an online platform that can be used by civil society organizations to formulate a comprehensive strategy for ending statelessness in Lebanon.
The causes of statelessness vary, even within a small country like Lebanon. A major cause is lack of identity documentation, which can only be obtained through registration. Many Lebanese were left unregistered during the country’s first and only census in 1932, resulting in generations of Lebanese that lack the identity documentation to prove their nationality (often referred to as Lebanese who are unable to “perfect” their nationality). Unregistered Lebanese children also fall into this category of ‘un-perfected’ nationality; Lebanese children are not recognized as Lebanese nationals until their birth has been registered in an onerous four or five-step process. If a birth is not registered within a year (which can happen for a number of reasons, including the parents’ marriage not being registered with the State, the child having a single mother, the birth occurring at home as opposed to in a hospital, mobility issues, or simply a lack of awareness about the process), the child’s parents must go to court to effectuate the registration, a process that is costly and therefore inaccessible to many. Furthermore, although there are provisions in Lebanese law intended to safeguard against statelessness at birth (where both parents are unknown), they are rarely implemented. When they are implemented, it is only where the child is deemed to be a newborn of 30 days or younger. Lebanese law is also patrilineal, that is, it does not allow for Lebanese nationality to be transmitted through a mother to her children, so where a child is unable to acquire its father’s nationality (because he is stateless himself, or missing, or dead), the child also becomes stateless.
Additionally, Lebanon has a large population of Palestinian and Syrian refugees that are either stateless or at risk of becoming stateless. Since 2011, the war in Syria has displaced over 1.5 million Syrians to Lebanon. Many of these refugees lost their identity documentation when they fled and are now left in Lebanon with no documented nationality. Many Syrian refugees have been in Lebanon long enough to give birth there, at which point they must go through the same birth registration process outlined above, with an additional step requiring registration at the foreign ministry and the Syrian embassy. For a Syrian refugee family living in poverty, often unaware of the registration process, and facing increasing xenophobia, the birth registration process is extremely onerous. Often a family is forced to flee Syria shortly after the birth of their child, and the child comes to Lebanon without having been registered in Syria. Because the child was not born in Lebanon, it cannot be registered there, and it becomes stateless.
The Syrian refugee crisis also displaced about 31,000 Palestine refugees registered in Syria (“PRS”) to Lebanon. They are subject to the similar issues regarding birth registration as refugees who are Syrian nationals. Additionally, there are about 270,000 Palestine refugees in Lebanon (“PRL”) registered with the United Nations Relief Works Agency (“UNRWA”), responsible for providing temporary aid and assistance to Palestine refugees. These are also registered with the Lebanese government, and are issued identity documentation marking them as Palestine refugees. A third group of Palestine refugees are unregistered with UNRWA, but are registered with the Lebanese government. They, as well as the PRL, are subject to many of the same problems regarding nationality faced by Lebanese with “un-perfected” nationality. Finally, there are Palestinians who are not registered with UNRWA nor the Lebanese government (“non-ID Palestinians”). Non-ID Palestinians deal with additional problems in terms of mobility and access to services because they have no identification documentation whatsoever.
Because the causes of statelessness in Lebanon are so diverse, identifying populations is often difficult, as is identifying overarching protection needs. Based on our research, we divided the population of concern into roughly three categories: (1) Lebanese nationals who are unable to perfect their nationality by obtaining identification documents because they are unregistered with the State; (2) stateless individuals who cannot claim any nationality, Lebanese or otherwise, including foundlings, children born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father, and non-ID Palestinians; and (3) those at risk of statelessness, including registered Palestine refugees, Syrian refugees (including Syrian children born in Lebanon or those born in Syria and displaced to Lebanon before being registered in Syria), and other migrants. These three distinct groups face some of the same problems, including lack of identity documentation (resulting in mobility issues and, for certain groups, lack of access to health care and other services for which they would otherwise be eligible), discriminatory treatment of women, and difficulties in completing birth registration (which all children born in Lebanon are entitled to, regardless of parentage).
Given the diversity of the stateless population in Lebanon and the urgency of the issue, the Clinic’s focus is to unite and amplify the work of civil society organizations by finding a common thread that connects the aforementioned populations of concern. In order to do so, the Clinic needed to travel to Lebanon to meet with the key organizations working on issues of statelessness and perfecting nationality in Lebanon. In November, my colleague Claudia Bennett and I traveled with Professor Akram to Beirut to do exactly that.
