Hariri, HRW Discuss Syrian Refugees, Granting Lebanese Women Right to Pass Nationality to Children
Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri held a meeting at the Center House on Friday with a delegation from Human Rights Watch headed by its Executive Director Kenneth Roth, in the presence of MP Roula Tabsh.
After the meeting, Roth said: “Human Rights Watch just had a very productive meeting with the Prime Minister. We focused on four areas.
We discussed the next steps in the waste management crisis and how we can make sure that there is a real community consensus about what’s required.
We spoke about the importance of really taking the opportunity created by the National Human Rights Institute to address the problem of torture and make sure that the moves to stop torture end up attacking torture in reality.
We discussed the problem of Lebanese women married to non-Lebanese men being unable to confer nationality to their family. We understand that there has been long-standing fears that granting this right and ending this discrimination against women would somehow change the demographic balance of Lebanon. In fact, that is a complete exaggeration from the statistics that everybody knows regarding how small a problem it is. It is a big problem for these women and their children. We discussed some practical ways forward, perhaps even a passport that has some limited rights but at least gives these children the ability to travel and the security of knowing they are Lebanese in their home country.
Finally, we talked about the issue of Syrian refugees. We all agree that it is premature to send anybody back to Syria where Assad’s prisons remain filled, where people are being tortured and executed. The real question is, while the refugees are in Lebanon, how do we make sure that they are not so miserable that they are effectively forced back.”
He added: “The biggest problem has been the difficulty of people paying the 200 dollars per six months fee to be registered. While the government has issued a waiver of that fee in certain cases, there are some big exceptions, which large numbers, probably half the refugees, are falling through. They are afraid to travel, they have difficulty sending their kids to school and accessing healthcare. That is not in anybody’s interest. It’s not in Lebanon’s interest to have an uneducated group of children, and not to know where these people are because they are not registered.”
He concluded: “We discussed what it would take to make sure that this waiver of 200 dollars fee applies across the board, so everybody has the basic necessities of life while they are in Lebanon, while they wait for things to improve in Syria.”
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