Back to Contents Asylos: Moving on to access to justice, security and state protection, do you know whether stateless Palestinians go to the police in cases they were victims of abuse/crime? Katherine Harbord: I have heard anecdotally that there's sort of, quote-unquote, "no point reporting complaints to the police because nothing will happen or they want--" there is a certain amount of corruption in the system, so justice isn't easy to secure. That things depend on kind of personal patronage networks that you may or may not have. But how valid a perception that is, I'm not able to judge. Anything involving a police complaint would go unreported. So “a policeman detained me illegally and beat me”, Probably, that would go unreported, because there would be a perception that there would be no point and it might bring further trouble. I have heard from a Palestinian somewhere down near Tyre in south Lebanon - that there was a reluctance to report problems from within the camps to the police. So if it's one Palestinian having a problem with another Palestinian or if something criminal has occurred, they prefer to kind of resolve it within the camp. Because of police perceptions, because of kind of inter-camp structures and things. But I heard that from one woman only. Asylos: Do you have an idea what she referred to when she spoke of existing structures to resolve conflicts within camps? Katherine Harbord: So more kind of appeals to the older members of the community to kind of create resolution in cases of-- this particular case we were speaking about was a case of sexual violence. But she was acknowledging it was-obviously, sexual violence is particularly complicated in this context because of kind of connotations of so called honour and things. It was, anyway, a more complex case. I don't know, necessarily, that a murder, for example, would be dealt with by the same way. But it was certainly this woman's impression that the community preferred as far as possible to police itself, rather than have recourse to the Lebanese police. They felt that it was also more likely to lead to more just resolutions. Asylos: Our last point concerns political participation and protests. Are stateless Palestinians permitted to gather, to protest, or to hold a political office in Lebanon? Are there, for example, some public political figures who have--? Katherine Harbord: So the one Palestinian I interviewed who claimed asylum in Europe based on the fact that he felt he was being targeted in Lebanon because of his political interests and political organisations and seeking to secure rights and representation for Palestinian people. He felt that he was arrested as a retaliation for kind of highlighting injustices faced by stateless Palestinians in Lebanon. He also claimed that he had been detained by police and that he had been subject to kind of harassment by local officials. The Home Office disputed his evidence and the judge did not find his account credible. And I think part of that was that we struggled to "prove" that this had happened.. Asylos: Is there anything you would like to add or share that was not being covered? Please feel free to do so. Katherine Harbord: No. I do think it's important to stress the wider situation that Lebanon has experienced. Not only with the civil war and the kind of the dysfunction of governments for a number of years now. All of these things have made it much harder to kind of disaggregate the issue of stateless Palestinians here and made the question of finding evidence much harder because there are bigger problems. So the situations of Palestinians is flying a bit under the radar in the last couple of years. I think the fact that we do see discriminations against stateless Palestinians in Lebanon in the '90s early 2000s probably indicates there is some level still continuing of this. It's just that these statistics and things aren't being recorded now, whereas they were before. So the absence of recent evidence shouldn't be evidence of absence. 17. Appendices 166