Back to Contents Katherine Harbord, a lecturer in human rights specialised in the Middle East whom we interviewed for this report in October 2022 shared her knowledge on checkpoints specifically in the North of Lebanon: “So I have a very little bit of information, but this relates to checkpoints in the north, near to the camps near Tripoli. What I have been told by stateless Palestinian asylum seekers from Lebanon is that Lebanese armed forces checkpoints or Lebanese police checkpoints are not much of a problem any more, problems rather come from militia, Hezbollah and others. It was certainly my interlocutors’ understanding that they felt that Palestinians, those with Lebanese registration or Palestinians from Syria, were disproportionately being detained at checkpoints and sometimes stripped of their freedom of movement, sometimes detained. Generally speaking, my understanding is that they will be arrested or detained the first time and usually either given a warning, sort of, «We don’t want your sort here, or you can’t pass through here.» And if they persist, then they might be sort of roughed up a little bit, slapped or beaten. This was corroborated by three individuals that I’ve spoken to separately about this in the last few years. As I say, they were all connected with the Tripoli region. But I heard similar stories from each of them, which led me to kind of conclude that there probably is some consistency. In one case, the man that was detained was beaten quite badly, and this was because he was a Sunni man who was married to a Shia woman and it was a Shia militia that detained him. So the problem, in that case, was not his Palestinian identity if you like, but rather a sectarian question. All of them felt they were being discriminated against because they were Palestinians, but there may also be other elements to it. I’ve heard of one person who was arrested but this is going back about five or six years. He was arrested by the police. He was a non-ID man. He was ostensibly arrested because of his lack of ID and kind of suspicion of illegal status or something like that. He was removed to a detention centre, not exactly prison. He reported ill-treatment. And his family was able to secure his release through payment of a bribe. And again, he felt that his status as a non-ID Palestinian was behind this and that his arrest was an opportunity for a bribe. Certainly anecdotally based on the numbers of persons I talked to on this matter, but Syrian Palestinians perceived that they experience more discrimination than other Palestinian groups and receive more verbal abuse and sort of racist “behaviour.” There’s a lot of prejudice against them. There’s obviously a lot of prejudice against stateless Palestinians, full stop, especially in Lebanon. But this is kind of magnified for the Syrian Palestinians. [...] So my understanding with the militias was that they detain people either at the checkpoint or at a quasi-military base. With the police, the man who was detained was taken first to a local police station and later to a detention centre in Beirut.” (Source: Katherine Harbord, interview record, 13 October 2022) The Jordanian political economist and long-time commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian dialogue Riad Al Khouri who was interviewed for this report in October 2022 considered that checkpoints “may have been a problem in the past but are no longer a major problem”: “Now, to clarify, we are talking about two distinct kinds of checkpoints here. One would be an official checkpoint of the Lebanese army or the Lebanese police. And there are few problems or restrictions in this regard, including arbitrary arrest. I do not think this is a real problem. The other checkpoints are informal. Lebanon is full of militias. These are not government bodies, they are private. They may, in a certain area, be representative of people. In other words, they are not just criminal gangs, they are somehow politically or socially based, and they may from time to time have checkpoints. But again, talking about the present, this is not a major problem. It was a major problem in the past going back to the 1970s in ‘80s, it would be possible to hold people or even imprison or even kill at these checkpoints, including Palestinian refugees. But this was 40 years ago. We are talking about the present. This is no longer a major problem.” (Source: Riad Al Khouri, interview record, 7 October 2022) In a series of written responses to questions sent by Asylos for this report, Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab, Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University indicated in October 2022 that: “Stateless Palestinians remain at risk of detention or arrest if they reach a checkpoint and do not have documentation. This is why a significant number of them opt out of moving from region to region entirely. Many stateless Palestinians avoid checkpoints entirely, and remain in the camps/informal tented settlements where they are located. Presently, though they are detained/arrested for not having documentation, the Internal Security Forces (ISF) has been known to release them after paying a fine. 5. Freedom of movement 51