Lebanon has been a recipient of large international support during the refugee crisis. This support is channelled to the refugees via a complex and sometimes inefficient coordination and implementation structure that increasingly reflects the dynamics of the country’s political settlement. This chapter explores the ways in which Lebanon’s political economy interacts with the international aid architecture, shedding light on mechanisms and relations that directly impact the effectiveness of delivering protection in the region.

3.1 Coordinating the response

The main formal space where the delivery of humanitarian aid interacts with Lebanese policymaking is the Lebanon crisis response coordination structure.

Box 4
What is coordination of a humanitarian response?

“Coordination is the systematic utilization of policy instruments to deliver humanitarian assistance in a cohesive and effective manner. Such instruments include: (1) strategic planning; (2) gathering data and managing information; (3) mobilizing resources and assuring accountability; (4) orchestrating a functional division of labour in the field; (5) negotiating and maintaining a serviceable framework with host political authorities; and (6) providing leadership. Sensibly and sensitively employed, such instruments inject an element of discipline without unduly constraining action.” [68]

Coordination as an approach to delivery of humanitarian assistance has emerged under the so-called Transformative Agenda[69] (see box 4 for the most commonly used formal definition of coordination). In practical terms, coordination is a complex web of semi-regular meetings with semi-fixed agendas that offer a structured space in which key actors — including government ministries, UN agencies, donors and implementing aid agencies — can discuss the planning, funding and implementation of a humanitarian response. Ideally, such coordination should be run by the government of the host country.

While it is widely assumed that the coordination structure is where much of the politics of aid takes place, this structure (i) often coexists with other channels of aid delivery and (ii) its internal decision-making is significantly influenced by the political processes of the country where a response takes place. The effectiveness of aid greatly depends on, first, the design of the response and, second, the donors’ and host government’s capacity to create political acceptance and enabling conditions for its implementation. Parliamentary elections, presidential nominations, interference by outside actors, regional or global financial and economic crises — all these can have a profound impact on the outcomes of aid responses and on the capacity of the key actors to deliver them. While the political microcosm of aid response plays an important role in determining the quality of implementation, the way in which aid interacts with the political economy of the host country is often crucial for determining its success.

By early 2018 the coordination structure in Lebanon had become an extraordinarily complex one, with multiple and sometimes mutually conflicting decision-making centres and agendas. This complexity is an outcome of the intricacies of international aid architecture and the convolutions of the Lebanese political system discussed in the first chapter. While initially focused on delivering humanitarian assistance, the complexity of the response increased in 2016 with the inclusion of development funding, governed by its own set of political rules and conditions. A lot of development funding has not been formally included under the coordination structures and may never be, but its very presence has impacted the political dynamics around the response in ways we will analyse further in the report.

3.2 Coordination tools

By the summer of 2018 there were three main fora in which the refugee response in Lebanon was shaped: the actual aid response; the Lebanese government; and the third, new, development-focused dialogue (see figure 17). One set of actors is contributing to all three conversations: international donor countries, which are investing in the humanitarian response, development aid/loans and conducting political dialogue with the government actors.[70]

Figure 17
The three main fora in which the refugee response is shaped
The three main fora in which the refugee response is shaped

The Lebanon aid response is formally classified as a refugee emergency. This means that UNHCR has a leading role in the actual humanitarian response, fulfilling a triple function of coordinating the response along with the host government, (co)implementing key large-scale interventions, and being one of the main (I)NGO donors.[71] Until recently, UNHCR has also attracted by far the most international financing, meaning it had de facto “coordinated through the allocation of resources.”[72]

This control over the largest part of available financial resources and “triple-hatted” role has often been questioned by other aid agencies concerned about the conflict of interest it represented.[73] It also gave the UNHCR considerable power in shaping the response from within and made it a key interlocutor to both donors and the Lebanese government.

At the same time, UNHCR’s political position in the country has always been relatively weak. Lebanon is not a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention, and UNHCR is present in the country on the basis of Lebanon’s invitation.[74] Unlike in neighbouring Jordan, where a strictly implemented Memorandum of Understanding defines UNHCR’s activities, there is a lack of clarity about the agency's formal status and the division of responsibilities between the UNHCR and the Lebanese Government. This has made UNHCR both freer to design its interventions and more vulnerable to government policy changes, pressures limiting the reach of its protection mandate and opportunistic attacks by Lebanese politicians for short-term political gains.[75]

UNHCR’s negotiating position relies heavily on the support of key donors: various countries that wield influence on different parts of the government by virtue of the amount of funding they provide and their bilateral relations with Lebanon. In its own words and the perception of the donor community, the UNHCR has also tried to carefully calibrate the response to ensure the maximum impact for refugees with minimal damage to the relationship with the government. [76] This is a balance that, after the May 2018 elections, is becoming increasingly difficult to strike. UNHCR’s position has become increasingly precarious in the light of recent efforts by the General Security[77] to return Syrian refugees, which UNHCR refused to endorse. [78] The ensuing threats and measures taken against the agency by Hezbollah-allied Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil further undermined the agency.[79]

The (multi)annual planning base for the response is the Lebanon Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) whose Steering Committee sets the overarching response framework. This document is produced jointly by the UNHCR and the Government of Lebanon, with input from other UN agencies and some limited input from civil society.[80] LCRP serves as the needs overview, strategic response plan, and international funding appeal for the response, and it incorporates both humanitarian/refugee and stabilisation/resilience components. It does not, however, coordinate the large-scale development and infrastructural funding that has become available through World Bank and other similar IFI channels.

The LCRP for 2017-2020 explicitly recognises the need to provide protection and assistance to vulnerable populations and puts the responsibility of implementation on Lebanese institutions, including the responsibility for defining the target population and the allowed scope of interventions. This is a position the government occasionally uses to restrict the scope and target populations of interventions.[81] These limitations have been strongly felt in several key sectors, as will be outlined below.

The response is organised in Sector Working Groups originally formed under the leadership of UNHCR and the government, and led by the UNHCR Inter-Agency Coordination Unit. The UNHCR Representative has a direct communication line with the government, giving the agency an important role in negotiating the possible modalities of interventions, albeit with the above mentioned limitations.

The response is divided into sectors: energy, basic assistance, food security, health, livelihoods, protection, shelter, social stability, water and education. Inter-agency and inter-sector coordination is led by the Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs (MoSA) and co-chaired by UNHCR and UNDP. As of 2016, all sectors are under the leadership of the government of Lebanon line ministries, with co-coordination from UNHCR and global cluster lead agencies for their respective sectors (UNDP, UNICEF, WFP/FAO, WHO).

At the beginning, this structure allowed for the participation of the UN, the government and the INGOs. As already discussed, the government was initially satisfied to outsource refugee crisis management to the UN. But the adoption of the October Policy marked a change in the broader policy context and the increased involvement and even gradual takeover of some sectors by relevant line ministries. It also meant restrictions on some interventions.

For example, aid agencies were highly restricted when it came to livelihood interventions and work on refugee resilience, and were instead encouraged to work on the resilience of Lebanese host communities.[82] Attempts by the government to legally re-classify large numbers of refugees as labour migrants meant that by the end of 2015, refugees were largely faced with a choice between poverty and aid dependency or the loss of the limited protection that refugee status afforded them.

This state of affairs contradicts the very purpose of any refugee response, which in principle seeks to ensure conflict-sensitive refugee protection, access to livelihoods and, where possible, refugee self-reliance. Thus in the course of 2015, aid actors and the government found themselves at loggerheads on both the principle and purpose of the response.

An uneasy balance was maintained by finding concrete areas where the interests of specific ministries overlapped with the broader purpose of the refugee response. As individual government ministers slowly started recognising the scale of challenges faced in their sectors, as well as the potential for a development dividend from donors, their interest in the response grew. The Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Public Health and gradually the Ministry of Environment moved in to assert control over the funding flows that would support these sectors and offer some modest support for a continuing refugee presence from within the government.

In 2016, for instance, the Ministry of Education increased the capacity of the public education system and accepted a large number of previously rejected Syrian children after the international community agreed to pay for the education of both refugee and Lebanese children. While minister Eliaas Abou-Saab’s long-term political alliances were with Hezbollah and the Alawite minority in Syria, the development dividend proved a strong enough incentive to allow Syrian children access to a highly important service. By 2017, even under the new minister, high-ranking civil servants were preparing to use the available development funding to further strengthen the system.[83]

These examples illustrate two trends at work since 2015. First, the response has become increasingly influenced by the agendas of individual Lebanese power brokers. Second, the balancing act between these individuals’ interests and the stated intentions of the country’s security apparatus provided space within which the refugees were able to stay on Lebanon’s territory and receive at least minimal protection.

3.3 A sea change

The sight of Syrian refugees arriving in their thousands on Greek islands in the summer of 2015 opened the eyes of European publics and policymakers to the scale of the displacement crisis and the consequences it could have on European stability. The summer of 2015 was seen by many observers as a political turning point which led to important changes in the response to the crisis in both Europe and Lebanon.

The history of the Mediterranean crisis is significant for the policy framework of Europe’s renewed engagement in Lebanon in autumn 2015. The moral panic that engulfed the continent was followed by a series of policy and funding approaches aimed at shoring up protection in the region in the expectation that improved quality of asylum would prevent refugees from embarking on the journey to Europe.

Based on the interviews conducted for this research, we conclude that these policies were based on a combination of several factors: need to respond to public anxiety; a genuine realisation of the challenges host countries were facing; and a set of misunderstandings about refugee demography and their transit routes including the erroneous assumption that Lebanon and Jordan had a pool of Syrian refugees capable of reaching Europe and ready to embark on the journey. In an interview with News Deeply, a UNHCR official summarised the impact of these combined wrong assumptions: “If no one had arrived in Europe that summer, would there have been a deal [with Lebanon and Jordan]? No.”[84]

But the refugees did arrive and agreements were made, starting with the EU-Turkey agreement, which closed exit routes for refugees from the region. These efforts succeeded in stemming refugee flows to Europe, but with the effect of burdening all future EU policies in the region, including Lebanon, with a significant moral debt. Policies assisting the Levantine host countries in managing the refugee crises on their territories were seen by the Lebanese government as reactive and disingenuous as far as the plight of refugees was concerned. Instead they were perceived to have been motivated by the self-interested protection of EU border. [85] Many donors have pointed out that, since 2015, Lebanese policymakers often begin negotiations by stating that they “don’t want refugees here anymore than you in Europe do”, undermining the normative and political value of EU funding from the outset.[86] We regularly encountered this framing throughout our research.[87]

Box 5
Lebanon: the misunderstood transit hub

Lebanon’s significant role in the development of the Mediterranean crisis has been somewhat misunderstood and is not always accurately presented in the public or policy discourse.

Despite the January 2015 tightening of entry requirements for Syrian citizens, in the summer of that year Syrians were still allowed transit through Lebanon on the condition that they were able to show an onward ticket and a visa for their final destination. Turkey was one of the few countries that still accepted Syrian citizens without visas, so an onward ticket to Turkey was sufficient to grant Syrians regular transit through Lebanon.

At the time a booming business developed between Syria and Lebanon, with bus tour operators in Syria buying ferry tickets between Lebanon’s northern harbour of Tripoli and Turkey, and bussing Syrians from Damascus and Latakia to Tripoli, where they would take the line ferry service to Turkey. The regular ferry service was fully booked over the summer, carrying what the UN at the time estimated was a total of around 150,000 Syrians to Turkey. It is important to stress that this whole operation was fully legal according to Syrian, Lebanese and Turkish laws and that the vast majority of people taking the ferries were Syrians that had until that point remained in Syria. Realising, most likely, that the war would be protracted and its outcome uncertain, many among them invested their last savings or sold their property in Syria in order to invest in the prospect of a safer life in Europe.

Only 10-20% of the people making this journey were Syrian refugees from Lebanon. Years of life in displacement and recent state policies aimed at creating legal insecurity and poverty succeeded in marginalising them sufficiently for the Turkey route to become almost insurmountably difficult and financially unaffordable for the vast majority.

This sea route to Turkey was narrowing down in the autumn of 2015, and had effectively stopped when Turkey introduced visas for Syrians coming via third countries in January 2016, triggering automatic closure of the transit route through Lebanon. The EU-Turkey agreement followed in March 2016, tightening the lid on this operation.

3.4 The coming of the compacts

With a new awareness of the crisis taking hold among Europeans, on February 4 2016 the UK, Germany, Kuwait, Norway and the UN co-hosted a conference in London aimed at raising significant new funding for the response. The participants also hoped to reframe the issue, acknowledging its protracted character and its political importance in Europe and beyond. The funding raised in London was supposed to “meet the immediate and longer-term needs of those affected”[88], reflecting two important ideas that would dominate discussion of the crisis in the coming years:

(a)
the recognition that the crisis will be long-term and that donors and host countries alike would need to adopt new language, policies and policy instruments in order to tackle it
(b)
the recognition that the crisis affects not just displaced Syrians but also their host communities.

The conference raised over USD 12 billion in pledges — USD 6 billion for 2016 and a further USD 6.1 billion for 2017-20 — to “enable partners to plan ahead”.[89]

The London Conference marked a clear shift towards a response that linked humanitarian and development agendas. The shift was captured in LCRP which was being drafted at the time and which, for the first time, spanned a period longer than a year (2017-2020).[90] The very framing of the document — which at the time of writing is still the main policy basis for the response — contains an implicit acknowledgement by Lebanon’s political establishment that the crisis will be protracted and that refugees will likely stay in large numbers on Lebanon’s territory for the foreseeable future. It was also an outcome of an implicit understanding that large amounts of previously inaccessible funding, such as World Bank concessional loans, would now be made available for Lebanon’s development needs. Difference remains over whether this should be interpreted as an investment in Lebanon’s capacity to host displaced Syrians, or is a pay-off for its decision to allow them protection, regardless of the quality of asylum.[91]

If there were ever talks about conditionality between the quality of asylum and the availability of funding, their content was never made public.[92] This was in part done as a way to ease the interactions in the contexts of mixed humanitarian/development funding, where the unconditional nature of humanitarian aid coexists uncomfortably with various types of conditioning that are part and parcel of development assistance. The lack of explicit discussion of Lebanon’s obligations towards refugees was a result of a shared understanding that the ambiguity was essential for maintaining any form of political acceptance, if not buy-in, from those political actors who saw the protracted presence of Syrian refugees as an existential threat.[93]

The main policy instrument designed by the EU to deliver this ambitious agenda was the EU Compact[94]: an agreement between the EU Commission and the Lebanese government to deliver a comprehensive approach to support Lebanon in offering protection to an estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees with a budget of around EUR 400 million.

The aspirational EU public document describes the Compact’s objectives as:

strengthening mutual cooperation between Lebanon and the EU over the period 2016-2020

supporting the stabilisation of the country

providing an appropriate and safe environment for refugees and displaced persons from Syria, including their residency status, and a beneficial environment for vulnerable host communities

increasing the resilience of Lebanon’s economy and infrastructure

investing in job-creating projects to allow needs, including humanitarian needs, to be addressed in an effective, dignified and fair manner.[95]

In the actual text of the Compact, however, Lebanon only “commits to continue seeking, in conformity with Lebanese laws, ways to facilitate the streamlining of regulations governing [Syrian refugees’] stay … with a view to easing their controlled access to the job market in sectors where they are not in direct competition with Lebanese….”[96] While Lebanon has only committed to “continue seeking” solutions, in a similar document signed with the EU, Jordan has committed itself to tangible objectives including the commitment to create 200,000 job opportunities for Syrians over a period of three years. The ambiguous nature of Lebanon’s commitments to address the issues at the heart of the refugee crisis (refugees’ access to legal stay and labour) remain, and continue being the key obstacles to improving refugees’ conditions.

Complementing the EU Compact, the World Bank has opened its Concessional Funding Facility for both Lebanon and Jordan, for which as middle-income countries they had previously been ineligible. Donor commitment to Lebanon was further showcased in two major conferences held in April 2018 in Brussels and Paris, one focused on the refugee crisis and the other on creating the development dividend. Even though pledges against the LCRP remained stable, joint commitments and pledges made at the two conferences were exceptionally high by the standards of almost any aid response since the end of Cold War.

According to an EU-run financial tracking mechanism, total support to Lebanon in 2017 amounted to USD 2.8 billion, out of which 1.3 billion was in grants and the rest in loans.[97] Lebanon is a very close second to Jordan in grants per refugee with USD 1304 to Jordan’s USD 1456 — but with much less improvement in socio-economic indicators to show for these sums. Turkey, which hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, has received only USD 447 per refugee under the EU-Turkey agreement. The Jordan and Lebanon Compacts have certainly delivered a much more generous aid package. Across all countries, close to three-quarters of the grants were provided by three donors — the US (USD 366 million), Germany (USD 350 million) and EU institutions (USD 215 million).

Figure 18
Contributions to Lebanon by donor, 2017[98]
Contributions to Lebanon by donor, 2017

In 2018 the commitments continued, albeit humanitarian donations remained at levels similar to 2017. But at a donor conference in Paris in April 2018 various donors and financial institutions committed an additional USD 11 billion to Lebanon’s development in loans and grants. The conference firmly linked the loans to Lebanon’s commitment to the reform agenda, and specifically reform of dysfunctional public services such as electricity, water or waste management. But the French president Emmanuel Macron also put the pledges firmly in the context of the refugee crisis by stating that the “exceptional mobilisation” of funds was needed “to guarantee the stability that Lebanon needs” in facing “the consequences of the Syrian civil war, by welcoming on its territory over a million Syrian refugees.”[99]

3.5 Protecting the refugees by reforming the country?

The funds pledged to Lebanon following the London Conference opened a significant new chapter in the development of the country and the refugee response. As the preceding section sets out, the sheer amount of funding made available through these mechanisms in 2018 significantly outweighs the funding against the LCRP, and by now matches the losses Lebanon is believed to have suffered through the combined impact of the Syrian war and the refugee crisis.[100]

But the development funding — especially that being made available by development banks — is in principle accompanied by much higher levels of conditionality, and more often than not such conditionality concerns structural reforms. Lebanon is not an exception, but the fact that the funding was made available as an attempt to mitigate the pressures that come with hosting refugees also meant that refugee protection — grounded in international refugee and human rights law — now became intertwined with the highly political reform agenda.

The logic on which this connection is made is that the Syrian refugee crisis has exposed and worsened the structural problems of the Lebanese political economy, and uncovered the need to tackle at least the most severe among them. In its white paper on the most pressing issues, the World Bank states that “the Syrian crisis has exacerbated already existing challenges and pressures compounding the need for reforms”.[101] A very similar sentiment has been echoed by high-ranking European officials, who see Lebanese public services as “always being fragile.” In their eyes, this is the consequence of “working with allegiances and sectarian/private interests rather than with the notion of public interest and public service”. “This has been exacerbated by the refugee crisis. Maybe the refugee crisis could be the final push to help them to reform.”[102]

While the logic behind this reasoning may in principle be correct, our research reveals at least three major challenges to this agenda:

The first is the question of principle. Regardless of Lebanon’s ratification of the Refugee Convention, the principle of non-refoulement, which is the cornerstone of refugee protection, is one of the hardest principles of international law. Even the most critical thinkers on the extent of state duties towards refugees agree that this provision is so strong that “at the extreme, the claim of asylum is virtually undeniable”.[103] As already witnessed elsewhere in the region, making refugee protection a part of a conversation that includes conditionality risks weakening this principle — or, indeed, reversing it by making refugee-hosting conditional on aid.

On the practical side, the reform/protection nexus helps Lebanese actors outsource some of the responsibility for providing services to international actors. For instance, the Ministry of Education’s move to open public schools to refugee children was prompted by the international community’s readiness to fund the whole public system for both Lebanese and Syrian students. The substantial WB funds made available to the Ministry of Education in 2016 and 2017 are being used to repair and renovate schools, but not to increase refugee children enrolment, which is still covered from the donations against the LCRP. The Lebanese Ministry of Social Affairs has successfully directed parts of the funding for the refugee crisis to its poverty reduction programme. Initially this was done through WFP food vouchers (which are also provided to most vulnerable Lebanese) and against the LCRP funding, and since 2016 also by planning to tap into the World Bank concessional funding facility.[104] As already described in the section above, hosting refugees has been perceived as a bargaining chip for access to economic benefits under the EU Compact negotiations. Both Lebanese officials and EU participants in this protracted process have shared stories of individual and sectarian interests, evolving mostly around access to European markets, reflected in these negotiations.

Thirdly, there is no evidence thus far that this approach can systematically deliver on the quality of asylum. The availability of funding has certainly managed to create a few breakthrough moments, but none has been followed up on. Donors’ readiness to pay for primary education of both Lebanese and Syrian pupils has opened the country’s public school system to Syrian school age children. At the same time, this assistance has not translated into opening the legal pathways for Syrian students to attend secondary or tertiary education. Following the London Conference, and as a result of increased donor funding and the political shifts described in the previous chapter, refugees were allowed to apply for work permits in three categories of jobs previously “reserved” for foreign workers: agriculture, construction and waste management. The conditions of employment however remained exploitative and the lack of residency permits remained a major source of vulnerability. In 2018, the legal situation for Syrian youth improved significantly when the GSO issued a circular allowing Syrian children who turned 15-18 after entering Lebanon and who do not have a Syrian passport or identity card to apply for temporary residency by presenting their Syrian individual status record. This move was seen as a large step towards allowing some form of legal protection — and was seen as a concession on the part of the GSO in advance of the Brussels 2 Conference. Meanwhile, legal stay for adult Syrians remains as elusive as ever.

Implementation of the economic reform agenda also remains an open question. In the short window between the election of president Aoun and the parliamentary elections in May 2018, the availability of concessional funding has enabled some reforms to be enacted: Lebanon has passed its first budget in twelve years; adopted a Private Public Partnership law, needed for accessing WB infrastructural funds; and even started the Greater Beirut Urban Transport Project. The issue of inefficient electricity supplies is still waiting to be tackled, but Lebanese entrepreneurs are gearing up for other big infrastructural projects expected to be tendered by the World Bank.

And while the Future Movement with its key Ministries (Prime Minister’s Office, Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Displaced) have been the public face for the reform project, the interviews we conducted in Beirut showed that the economic reform agenda had surprisingly broad cross-sectarian support. Less well-known corners of the political establishment, such as reform-minded Christians and Shi’ites, have leveraged their influence to push through some of the necessary legislation.

Many among them echoed one of the key findings of the WB priority reforms paper: that it is not refugees but governance that lies at the root of Lebanon’s failure to deliver basic services and generate inclusive growth and jobs.[105] In the view of these interlocutors, refugee presence may have opened the funds and triggered the quest for reform — and with it a struggle between the potential reformists and the forces determined to protect the rent-seeking arrangements that still dominate the country’s politics and economy. But the refugees’ lot remains dependent on a precarious balance between actors who see the potential for bringing the development dividend to Lebanon on the back of the refugee crisis, and the actors that see no interest in either. In this unfolding struggle, this most vulnerable group in Lebanon remain at risk of being either sidelined or instrumentalised as part of these opposing agendas.

Minear, L., 1992. ‘United Nations Coordination of the International Humanitarian Response to the Gulf Crisis, 1990-1992’, Occasional Paper nr. 13, Watson Institute for International Studies.
Inter-Agency Standing Committee, 2018. IASC Transformative Agenda, Geneva, link, (Accessed June 2018).
One more important but less well-documented channel also exists: the security dialogue and various security-related funding lines. The EU and some member states fund Lebanon’s border control capacity building, while some member states engage in more direct security funding. While this channel is not the focus of this report, we recognise its existence and its potential to influence refugee-related conversations. The impact of security funding is to some extent discussed in Saferworld & LCPS, 2018. Building peace.
Most emergency responses in the world are classified as complex or mixed emergencies, featuring both refugees and internal displacement, and are coordinated by the special UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Action or UN OCHA. UN OCHA is present in Lebanon, but it does not have as prominent a role as UNHCR. On this, see Deardorff Miller, S., 2017. Political and humanitarian responses to Syrian displacement, New York, NY, Routledge.
Bonard P. et al., 2015. Coordination Review: External review of coordination in Lebanon, link, (Accessed June 2018).
Ibid. Janmyr, M., 2018, ‘UNHCR and the Syrian refugee response: negotiating status and registration in Lebanon’, International Journal of Human Rights, 22(3), pp. 393–419 and interviews with UN and INGO representatives in Beirut, June-November 2017.
The UNHCR and the Lebanese government did sign a Memorandum of Understanding in 2003, when the agency engaged on protection of Iraqi refugees. This MoU however has been largely defunct. See: link.
Janmyr, M., 2018, ‘UNHCR and the Syrian refugee response: negotiating status and registration in Lebanon’, International Journal of Human Rights, 22(3), pp. 393–419 and interviews with UN and INGO representatives in Beirut, June-November 2017.
Interviews with UN officials in Beirut and various donors in Beirut and Europe throughout the research process
As already mentioned, GSO has been headed by an informal Hezbollah-ally for several terms already.
Starting from July 2017, Hezbollah has in coordination with the Syrian authorities organized several convoys of Syrian refugees who returned to Syria allegedly voluntarily, and has recently announced a more structural “assistance” to those wishing to return. See The Daily Star Lebanon, 2018. ‘Hezbollah-run centers open to refugees hoping to return to Syria’, 4 July, link, (Accessed July 2018) and Reuters, 2018. ‘Lebanon’s Hezbollah to work with Syrian state on refugee returns’, 29 June, link, (Accessed July 2018).
The Daily Star Lebanon, 2018. ‘Bassil freezes UNHCR staff residency permit’, 8 June, link (Accessed July 2018).
National and international non-governmental actors as a rule do not draft the LCRP, but provide feedback to the chapters drafted jointly by UN and the Government representatives, limiting their role to mainly reactive.
Alef and Pax, 2016. Trapped in Lebanon: The alarming human rights situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Beirut & Utrecht, link (Accessed June 2018).
Interviews with UN officials in Beirut, September 2017.
Interviews with donors and Lebanese government officials, Beirut, September 2017 and World Bank, Emergency Education System Stabilization, 2018. Washington D.C., link, (Accessed July 2018).
Howden, D. et al., 2017. ‘The Compact Experiment: Definitive account of the push for jobs for refugees in Jordan & Lebanon’, News Deeply Quarterly, link, (Accessed June 2018).
The sentiment was echoed through most of our conversations with the Shi’ite and Christian officials at all levels of government throughout the autumn and winter of 2017.
Interviews with various donor representatives, July-November 2017.
Interviews, Beirut, September-November 2017.
Government of the United Kingdom, 2018. ‘Supporting Syria and Region Conference 2016’, Archive, link, (Accessed June 2018).
Ibid.
Government of Lebanon and the United Nations, 2017. Lebanon Crisis Response Plan 2017-2020, Beirut, link, (Accessed June 2018).
Interviews with Lebanese government officials and politicians, Beirut, September-November 2017.
Interviews with donor representatives and Lebanese state officials, July-November 2017.
Interviews with UN officials and donors, July-November 2017.
A detailed comparative history of how the EU Compacts were designed can be found in Howden D. et al., 2017. ‘The Compact Experiment.’
European Commission, 2017, EU – Lebanon Partnership: The Compact, Brussels, link, (Accessed June 2018).
EU–Lebanon Association Council, 2016. Decision No 1/2016 of the EU–Lebanon Association Council of 11 November 2016 agreeing on EU–Lebanon Partnership Priorities, pp. 12, link, (Accessed June 2018).
European Council, 2018, Supporting Syria and the Region: Post-Brussels conference financial tracking, Report five, Brussels, link, (Accessed June 2018).
Ibid.
‘Transcription - Discours du Président de la République en clôture de la conférence du Cèdre’, 2018. 6 April, Paris, link, (Accessed June 2018).
For the assessment of these losses, see Harake, W., 2017. Priority Reforms, paragraph 26.
Harake, W., 2017. Priority Reforms, paragraph 4.
Interviews, July –November 2017.
Walzer, M., 1983. Spheres of justice: A defence of pluralism and equality, Oxford, Robertson, pp. 51.
World Bank, 2016. Project Paper on a Proposed Additional Financing Grant in the Amount of US$ 10 Million to the Lebanese Republic for an Emergency National Poverty Targeting Program Project, 27 June 2016, Report No: PAD1850, Washington D.C., link, (Accessed July 2018).
Harake, W., 2017. Priority Reforms; interviews, July-November 2017.