Ahmad slipped through the cars stopping at the red lights as he hopped from one vehicle to another selling flowers. The six-year-old boy is so small that he could hardly reach the cars’ window. He is among scores of Syrian refugee children working on the streets in Lebanon.
A fast-growing generation of Syrian children born in Lebanon since their parents fled the war in their country in 2011, are stateless, lacking legal recognition as citizens of any country. Without birth certificates, and official papers proving their identity, these children are simply invisible to the authorities.
According to the data of the Ministry of Social Affairs, some 250,000 children were born to Syrian migrant and refugee families since 2015. However, there is no data on Syrian births before that date, or on the number of unregistered births.
The majority of the newborns are not registered in any official register, including a certain percentage who don’t even have a birth certificate.
Maria Assi, executive director of Beyond, a local NGO that works on preventing child labor, underlines that the lack of basic documentation is the main reason for the alarming rise in the number of child labor among Syrians.
“They work in agriculture, collecting recyclables from garbage bins, in car repair shops, in begging, and many jobs for adults. These children cannot even access informal education because they are not registered and have no legal proof that they exist,” Assi told This is Beirut.
A complex registration process, lack of marriage certificates of the parents and unaffordable registration fees, in addition to ignorance of the registration procedures are among the reasons for failing to register newborn Syrians in Lebanon.
“Many couples who got married in Lebanon did not register their marriage,” Assi said. “This is especially true in informal Syrian refugee camps where religious ceremonies are carried out at the hands of a local uncertified sheikh to make the marriage ‘halal’ (legal according to religion), but there is no official documentation to prove that union.”
“Another reason could be that the parents do not register their children intentionally, because being stateless increases their chances of getting accepted as asylum seekers if they succeed to reach Europe,” Assi added.
Sociologist and psychology professor at the Lebanese University, Mona Fayyad, noted that the Arab world is home to the highest number of refugees and war-displaced children, who are left out of schooling and other basic rights.
“We will have whole generations of illiterate people,” Fayyad warned. “They would probably engage in some sort of labor or manual work, and others might deviate, becoming delinquents, while girls engage into early marriage.”
“The same applies to Syrian refugee children who are not registered and left without papers,” she added.
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has been investing time and money to mitigate the alarming problem of statelessness among Syrian children by offering legal counseling, and helping process registrations which, however, remain largely incomplete.
Jenny Bjerlestam, Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance specialist with NRC, points out that “the large majority of the children have some kind of birth certification from a doctor or a midwife, resulting in an increase of birth registration at the foreigners’ registry by 36%.”
Nonetheless, the next step of registration at the Syrian embassy is largely disregarded. Refugees mostly fear approaching the embassy for security concerns.
“Among other top barriers are the lack of awareness of the procedures, limited freedom of movement due to illegal residency or lack of identification documents, fees and transportation,” Bjerlestam said in an interview with This is Beirut.
But the main obstacle for children’s registration remains the illegal marriage contract of their parents. An estimated 33% of Syrian marriages contracted in Lebanon are not registered, thus unofficial under Lebanese Law.
“Of all those married in Lebanon, 3% have no marriage certification whatsoever, while marriage contracts made by uncertified clerics is estimated at 21%,” Bjerlestam noted.
Unregistered children will not be able to return to Syria with their families, leaving them with no option but to be smuggled back into their home country through the porous border.
“But there, again, without papers, they will have no access to any of their rights. It is a vicious circle. If their status is not legalized, these children will eventually pass on their statelessness to their own children,” the NRC official added.
According to human rights’ activist and lawyer Mohamad Araji, local and international NGOs are increasingly involved in helping refugees legalize their children, underpinning the gravity of the issue and its detrimental consequences on Lebanon and the children.
“Some NGOs have been lately working on the registration process from A to Z, but they cannot do anything for children who don’t even have a birth notification, as if they were not born at all, not to mention that some registrations are chaotic in the sense that the child is sometimes registered under the name of his uncle or a relative,” Araji said.
The Lebanese government is also showing flexibility to encourage the refugees to register their marriages and offsprings.
“While initially, the couple needed to have residency permits to legalize their marriage, it is now possible to register the marriage contract if one of them has a legal status. Also, parents can still register their children who exceeded the one-year deadline without a court procedure,” Araji added.
Under its Information, Counseling and Legal Assistance (ICLA) program, the NRC conducts information and awareness campaigns about the importance and the process of birth and marriage certification, and provides legal counseling and support in carrying out the actual registration. In certain cases, clerks are taken to the informal tented settlements to carry out the registration.
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