The Plight of the Rightless: Mapping and Understanding Statelessness in Tripoli-V1.3 Assessing Statelessness in Tripoli The data presented here was collected in January of 2018. Key informant interviews and focus group discussions helped determine issues and articulate hypotheses. Interviews were conducted with General Security officers, judges, lawyers, UN advocates, professors, civil servants and government officials. Focus group discussions included 12 stateless individuals from Tripoli with diverse profiles and background. A questionnaire was derived in light of these discussions to assess the status of stateless respondents and their family members, the availability of legal papers, the causes of statelessness, the impact of statelessness on perception and access to services, coping mechanisms, and initiatives taken to resolve stateless situations (court status, duration, cost and obstacles). Three questionnaires were developed: (i) a main stateless questionnaire, (ii) a control group non-stateless questionnaire, and (iii) a parent of stateless questionnaire. The control group questionnaire was essential to compare stateless and nonstateless groups of the same socio-economic background and thus consists of the same questions drafted in the main questionnaire. The parent questionnaire is a shorter version of the main one and was devised for Lebanese parents who have stateless non-registered children to help us assess the children’s situation. The detailed main questionnaire can be found in Appendix F. Hotspots of statelessness were localised and assessed through interviews held with 29 Mukhtars from Tripoli (five in Qobbeh, eight in Tebbeneh, one in Remmeneh, one in Haddadin, two in Sweiqa, one in Mheitra, three in Nouri, three in Tal, and five in Mina). Initial estimates were also obtained through visits to schools, mosques, owners of power generators, and other public access institutions in Tripoli. A snowball sampling approach was developed in light of this information with several entry points in every localized hotspot, allowing surveyors to start crawling the community through referrals from one respondent to another. Every surveyor was accompanied by one Tripolitan stateless person who also helped look for other stateless individuals and build an extensive database. For every two stateless respondents, a non-stateless person was surveyed in the same neighborhood. Demographics The survey identified a total of 1,439 stateless persons currently living in Tripoli, the majority of which resides in three main hotspots: Tebbeneh (30%), Beddawi (26%) and Qobbeh (20%).43 In fact, the survey shows that statelessness in Tripoli, and in particular in Beddawi, is the result of a significant migration phenomenon, with 31% of the respondents migrating from the caza of Akkar44. As such, their major destination, Beddawi, serves as a transit point between the outer parts of the city and its center. Moreover, the gender distribution of the surveyed respondents in both the stateless and non-stateless groups is 52% females versus 48% males, corresponding to a 1.09 female-to-male ratio. As for the age distribution of the surveyed adult stateless persons, 54% are between the age of 18 and 30, 32% between 31 and 50, and 14% above 50 years old. Additionally, the parent survey allowed us to identify 427 stateless children under the age of 18 (so one third of the total population of stateless individuals). 43 The number 1,439 includes both stateless adults and children. Specifically, from Wadi Khaled (6%), Talhayet, Halba, Abboudiyeh, Machta Hammoud, Massoudieh, Arida and Wadi el-Jamous. 44 29