Report: Registration of Syrian Refugees Births a Prelude for their Return
In light of the efforts exerted to return the displaced Syrians back to their homeland, Lebanon's foreign ministry initiated measures for the registration of refugees' births and civil documentation at the Syrian embassy in Beirut, al-Joumhouria daily reported on Saturday.
For that purpose, the “foreign ministry has referred to the interior ministry a memo from the Syrian Embassy wishing on the competent Lebanese authorities to work on personal status registration of refugees, especially marriages and births, mainly for Syrian persons who do not hold valid legal residence to facilitate access to Syrian identity documents and thus facilitate their return to their homeland,” said the daily.
“The embassy also proposes the cancellation of fines imposed on unlawful residency of Syrians who wish to leave Lebanon permanently,” it added.
A Lebanese minister who spoke on condition of anonymity told the daily: “The number of Syrian births in Lebanon are almost countless. We have been able to register around 260 thousand births since 2011.”
The daily added that several letters have been exchanged in that regard since the beginning of October between the foreign ministry, interior ministry and the Syrian embassy.
The Norwegian Refugee Council said in a report that around 92 percent of refugees in Lebanon are unable to complete all the legal and administrative steps to register the birth of their children.
NRC added that “thousands of children in Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq lack basic identity and civil documents, impacting their ability to claim a range of rights and protections and endangering their access to education and other services if they choose to return to Syria.”
Lebanon hosts more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees, who amount to more than a quarter of the country's population not to mention undocumented individuals, many of whom live in informal tented settlements.
The Syrian refugee influx into Lebanon has strained the country's infrastructure, and has also sparked accusations that refugee camps are harboring militants from the war.
The World Bank says the Syrian crisis has pushed an estimated 200,000 Lebanese into poverty, adding to the nation's one million poor.
Source: Naharnet
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