OWNING PROPERTY 101 Statelessness deprives people of their right to property due to their lack of legal personality. Yet, innovative workarounds have been developed, opening the door toward property ownership and, more rarely, own name registration. • Legally, stateless persons cannot own any property, except for Qayd el Dars individuals who can own movable goods. However, Akkar facilitates ownership, since land property can be transmitted by simple contracts as opposed to cadaster registration. That said, stateless persons have identified alternative solutions to own property rights mostly using informal methods. • For instance, registering property to relatives’ names is a classic workaround for stateless people. This practice was also observed in Tripoli, where 47% of stateless people registered property to their parents’ name and 15% to their spouses, compared to 24% and 25% in Akkar respectively. • A small minority of stateless people in Akkar (4%) have found ways to register property to their own names, mostly in Wadi Khaled; this is nonexistent among the stateless in Tripoli. • Most of these ownership agreements are actually based on unofficial “purchase warrants” (an example of the simple contracts referred to above). According to mukhtars, many of these properties are passed on from one generation to another, or bought, merely based on oral acknowledgements or a type of gentlemen’s agreement. 39% of Akkar’s adult stateless persons own property 33% of Tripoli’s adult stateless persons own property Fig 30. In whose name is your property registered? Spouse 25% Parents 24% Relatives 23% Others 9% Not registered 8% Children 8% Respondent's 4% Fig 31. Geography breakdown of stateless property owners 63% Wadi Khaled The Plain 26% Urban & Peri Urban Rural Hilly 7% 3% Jurd, High Hinterland © 2021 Siren Associates. All Rights Reserved.