European aid sent to Lebanon in an attempt to regulate migration by sea is funding practices that violate human rights, according to a global watchdog report published Wednesday.
As part of a policy to contain migration, authorities in Cyprus have physically pushed Syrian refugees back to Lebanon, and Lebanese security agencies have deported them, the Human Rights Watch report said.
The report, based on interviews with 16 Syrians who tried to leave Lebanon via smuggler boats, found that 15 of them “suffered human rights violations at the hands of Lebanese and/or Cypriot authorities.”
Rights groups have frequently criticized the tactics of authorities in both Lebanon and Cyprus in dealing with would-be migrants and asylum seekers. Officials from the two countries deny violating any laws but say they are overwhelmed by the migration they are facing.
Lebanon hosts around 775,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands more unregistered, the world’s highest refugee population per capita.
Lebanese political officials have pushed for western countries to resettle the refugees or assist in returning them to Syria — voluntarily or not. At the same time, Lebanon has an agreement with Cyprus to halt the smuggling of migrants and has received substantial funding from the European Union and European countries for border control.
The European Union and European countries gave Lebanon some 16.7 million euros ($18.5 million) from 2020 to 2023 for border management “mainly in the form of capacity-building projects explicitly aimed at enhancing Lebanon’s ability to prevent irregular migration,” the report said. In August, the European Union allocated another 32 million euros ($35.3 million) to “continue implementing border management enhancement projects in Lebanon through 2025,” it said.
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