238 Stateless Syrians in Turkey and Lebanon
registration system bring double deprivation to the agenda. In this respect, statelessness leaves the
individuals vulnerable to the outside dangers, while being unregistered prevents individuals from
access to fundamental humanitarian rights.
The process of obtaining a birth certificate in Lebanon involves similar phases of procedures
with the system in Syria. Having a Lebanese father as a prerequisite for the individuals to benefit
from the basic human rights confines the state to a limited system of jus sanguinis, i.e. an
inheritance-related system. In addition to this feature, having a registration certificate for their own
children of Lebanese parents in Lebanon requires a rather complex, costly process and procedures
to overcome. Because of these procedures, even citizens in Lebanon are sometimes unable to
provide this opportunity to their children, thus, statelessness may be in question for even the
Lebanese children. Due to this situation, which has reached a dangerous level for especially the
Palestinian refugees, who constitute a significant population in the country before the Syrians, the
Child Rights Committee (CRC) warned the State authorities about this and warned that newborns
should be registered as soon as possible. This warning and suggestion, which did not cause sufficient
progress even after some steps, did not reach the further stages for the Syrians in the short term.
However, the process of obtaining the birth registration certificate by both foreigners and Lebanese
citizens in the country prevents many families from receiving this document (ISI, 2016).
In Lebanon, it seems impossible for unregistered persons to benefit basic human rights. It is
not possible for unregistered persons to take advantage of rights such as health, education, legal
work and to pass through many checkpoints of the country for reasons of being caught or detained.
However, in Lebanon, the prohibition of identification services given previously by neighborhood
local administrators to the stateless/unidentified persons makes it difficult to prove their own
existence, as well as, to demand fundamental rights. This does not only involve foreigners who
come from outside but also severely affect the children of a Lebanese mother or immigrant parents
who are the citizen of another country. Because of the fact that it does not give equal rights to men
and women, it constitutes a violation of CEDAW, ICCPR, and CRC in particular, and causes the
country to differentiate from Turkey on an important issue. Considering the proportion of
Palestinian refugees in the country, the de facto statelessness, which can reach serious numbers with
marriage, extends even more important dimensions with the addition of Syrians (Wass, 2014, p.4).
With this feature, it is possible to say that unlike Turkey, Lebanon also hosts a mechanism that
reproduces the stateless generations in the de facto position. Consequently, a child of a Syrian father
and a Lebanese mother cannot obtain Lebanese citizenship, and being deprived of basic human
rights for children is preparing the ground for their confrontation with dual deprivation. In a study
conducted on the proportion of Lebanese women marrying a foreign male (especially Palestinian),
who had problems due to the deprivation of citizenship registration, only 18.000 marriages were
reported to be made between 1995-2008 (Charafeddine, 2009, p. 17). It can be seen that some of
the children born from these marriages have not been registered considering that there is no
provision, some of them have been recorded (religious), but do not have any legal document of
registration (Mutlu et al., 2016; ISI, 2016). However, an important problem that often overlooked
by discussions on child registration is that a de jure statelessness generation without registration
and/or citizenship will be an active member of the society in the future. It is necessary to say that
the concept of citizenship is a self-responsibility and an identification in Foucault’s definition (2000,
p. 290). In other words, identification cannot bring a solution to the problem of statelessness of
persons, but it is possible to allow them to use basic human rights and to be identified.
BORDER CROSSING