After seven years as reluctant hosts to a million or more Syrian refugees, some Lebanese politicians have become increasingly vocal since 2017 in calling for the refugees to go home, and certain Lebanese municipalities have since 2016 engaged in forcibly evicting them from their homes and expelling them from their localities. At least 3,664 Syrian nationals have been evicted from at least 13 municipalities from the beginning of 2016 through the first quarter of 2018 and almost 42,000 Syrian refugees remained at risk of eviction in 2017, according to the UN refugee agency. The Lebanese army evicted another 7,524 in the vicinity of the Rayak air base in the Bekaa Valley in 2017 and 15,126 more Syrians near the air base have pending eviction orders, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Social Affairs.

As Lebanon moves toward the first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade in May 2018, calls by some politicians and segments of the public for Syrians to return to Syria have increased, and certain politicians have been quick to blame displaced Syrians for a host of social and economic ills, many of which predate the Syrian refugee influx. The President of Lebanon, among others, has said that Lebanon can no longer cope with the social and financial costs of the refugee crisis. Lebanon’s refugee-hosting fatigue has been exacerbated by a lack of international support. The United Nations’ appeal for US$2.035 billion in international aid to meet the humanitarian assistance needs of Syrian refugees in Lebanon for 2017 was only 54 percent funded, as of December 2017. Lebanon also hosts approximately 175,000 Palestinian refugees. 

Mass evictions of Syrian refugees from municipalities are occurring in an environment of discrimination and harassment. Syrian refugees said that hostility and pressure to leave Lebanon is rising. Some said the pressure was coming only from certain politicians, municipal police, and from groups with political or racist agendas and not from their Lebanese landlords, employers, and neighbours. Others said harassment by neighbours and on the street has also increased.

Mahmoud, a 56-year-old man who had been living in Zahle since 2012, said that a group of municipal police led by a policewoman kicked and banged on the door of his family home in August 2017 and demanded to see all their papers, including legal residency papers for Lebanon, rental contract papers, and UN papers. Mahmoud said the municipal policewoman told him that his papers were not correct and that the family would have to leave the house in four days. “She was very rude to us. She gave us a paper to sign that said we had to leave our house, but what she said verbally was to leave Zahle and go back to Syria. I replied to her that I wished I could go back, but that I couldn’t.”

There has been little uniformity in the way municipalities have carried out forced evictions. Officials from some municipalities, like Zahle in the Bekaa Valley, drafted eviction notices and posted them on people’s doors; officials from other municipalities, like Mizyara in north Lebanon, only made verbal demands for Syrians to leave. In contrast to Mizyara and Zahle, where municipal police were highly aggressive and Lebanese residents cheered them on, in Hadath, just outside of Beirut, Syrian refugees consistently told Human Rights Watch that the municipal police who came to evict them were generally polite, even apologetic, saying that they were only carrying out the orders of the mayor.

There was also no consistency in the reasons given for evictions, in the documents municipal police demanded to see, or in the amount of time Syrians were given to leave. While Lebanese municipal authorities make tepid claims that their evictions of Syrian refugees have been based on housing regulation infractions, such as not registering their leases with municipalities, of which there are widespread breaches by Lebanese citizens as well, the measures these municipalities have taken have been directed exclusively at Syrian nationals and not Lebanese citizens.

Evidence obtained by Human Rights Watch makes it clear that Syrians in these communities were targeted because of their nationality: Statements by local authorities, politicians and community leaders surrounding the evictions support this conclusion, as does the inconsistency among municipalities in attributing evictions to labour and residency regulation violations, which are not valid legal bases for evicting tenants from their homes.

Report by the Human Rights Watch