Double Jeopardy: The Rights of Refugees in Marginalized Communities in the Middle East (abstract)

The plight of Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian refugees in Lebanon was been well documented in recent years. Less attention has been paid to the impact these large refugee populations have had on the already marginalized regions in the northern (Akkar), eastern (Bakaa), and southern (Tyre & Nabatiye) parts of the country. Basic human rights such as education, health care, childhood development, family, employment, and equal protection before the law are being undermined through the ‘double burden’ of a largely unregulated and under-serviced refugee population, which is now threatening to exceed 2 million by the end of 2015. This paper will deal with the nexus of refugee rights and the rights of impoverished populations in the marginalized regions of Lebanon. It will focus on the possibility of conceptualizing a comprehensive strategy, which takes the emergency needs of the newly arrived Syrians, as well as the already partially integrated Iraqi and Palestinian refugees into consideration, while simultaneously promoting the medium and long term economic and infrastructural development of the above mentioned peripheral parts of the country. This paper will focus on the Akkar region in the far north of Lebanon. From a theoretical perspective, it will argue that the developmental agenda inherent in Catholic Social Teaching offers Lebanon a rational for a revitalization of the country, based on the experience of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s, often referred to as Chehabism (after the Maronite president at the time), and exemplified in the reform proposals developed by Louis-Joseph Lebret and the 1964 IRFED project report for Lebanon. The original research to be presented in this paper will be drawn from projects carried out by this author, together with the staff at the Lebanese Emigration Research Center and in the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences, both at Notre Dame University, during the past four years

Towards Effective Temporary Labor Migration Schemes Report on Lebanon and Jordan

Euro-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration (CARIM)Migration policy is one of the fields least scrutinized in the Arab world. Responding to international economic trends, policy makers, social partners, and civil society players in Jordan and Lebanon have come to the realization that certain labour market bottlenecks can only be overcome by bringing in foreign workers. This has led to a significant immigration of laborers from a wide variety of countries and forced all relevant participants in the policy making process to renew their interest in coordinated temporary labour migration schemes. Both in Jordan and Lebanon, experts and policy makers alike see opportunities in these schemes that can help them meet the changing demands in their labour markets without permanently adding to their populations and labour forces. In the countries of origin, reciprocally, temporary labour migration schemes are intended to allow governments to alleviate pressures on their labour markets in the short and medium-term, and also let them reap the benefits of migration, through remittances and skill acquisition. In this study the authors will consider, based on a tripartite approach, whether the interests of employers and workers organizations coincide with those of governments in designing and implementing temporary migration schemes. The internationally codified rights of migrant workers to equality and non-discrimination and to their integration into societies and workplaces will be compared to the realities on the ground in Lebanon and Jordan. Have the limited provisions for protecting employees’ rights and a lack of their integration into the host societies negatively affected policy goals, closely linked to social cohesion? Does the effective protection of migrant workers contradict the needs of the indigenous populations in Lebanon and Jordan in general? Can the empowerment of the migrants themselves and their inclusion into the tripartite decision making process facilitate migration policy reform? Which social players can – and have – step in if the state and social partners neglect those roles foreseen for them by the international organizations dealing primarily with migrant labour, first and foremost the International Labour Organization (ILO)?CARIM is co-financed by the European University Institute and the European Unio

Insecurity, Migration and Return: The Case of Lebanon following the Summer 2006 War

Euro-Mediterranean Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration (CARIM)European Commission, EuropeAid Cooperation Office, RSCA

The Emergence of New Human Rights Methods and Tactics

Moderator: Peter Benkendorf, Dayton Collaboratory Presentations: Interesting Times: Returning to Blended Activism in a Culture of Impunity (Eugene R. Sensenig, Notre Dame University, Lebanon) Human Rights Research Done Remotely Using Open Press Sources: Mexican Disappearances Case Study (Maria Terra, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Yolanda Burckhardt, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities) Cryptocurrency and Its Implications for Human Rights Advocacy (Adam Todd, University of Dayton School of Law) Traffic Analysis Hub (Neil Giles, Stop the Traffik UK