Lebanon Issues - 2024

Disputes - international

Lebanon-Syria: lacking a treaty or other documentation describing the boundary, portions of the Lebanon-Syria boundary are unclear with several sections in dispute; in March 2021, Syria signed a contract with a Russian company for oil and gas exploration in a maritime area Lebanon claims as its own based on a 2011 map sent to the UN

Lebanon-Israel: Lebanon has claimed Shab'a Farms area in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights; the maritime boundary between Israel and Lebanon was established in October 2022

Refugees and internally displaced persons

refugees (country of origin): 487,000 (Palestinian refugees) (2022); 784,884 (Syria) (2023)

IDPs: 7,000 (2020)

stateless persons: undetermined (2016); note - tens of thousands of persons are stateless in Lebanon, including many Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Syrian Kurds denaturalized in Syria in 1962, children born to Lebanese women married to foreign or stateless men; most babies born to Syrian refugees, and Lebanese children whose births are unregistered

Trafficking in persons

tier rating: Tier 2 Watch List — Lebanon does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so; officials modestly increased investigations and continued to allow an NGO to screen migrants in the government detention center for trafficking; however, the government did not demonstrate overall increasing efforts, compared with the previous reporting period, to expand its anti-trafficking capacity; a caretaker government, judicial sector strike, and widespread civil service work stoppages limited Lebanon’s ability to establish effective anti-trafficking policies and impacted anti-trafficking efforts; efforts to identify and protect trafficking victims remained woefully inadequate; officials relied on NGOs and civil society to provide shelter and services to victims and did not report providing financial or in-kind support to those organizations; the parliament did not approve a labor law amendment, pending since 2009, to extend legal protections to foreign workers, nor did it approve a draft standardized contract for migrant workers; the lack of formal victim identification and referral procedures placed victims at risk of arrest, detention, or deportation for committing unlawful acts while being trafficked; the government did not reform its visa sponsorship system despite extreme trafficking vulnerabilities inherent in the system; officials rarely convicted traffickers for exploiting domestic servants, the prevalent form of trafficking in Lebanon; therefore, Lebanon was downgraded to Tier 2 Watch List (2023)

trafficking profile: human traffickers exploit domestic and foreign victims in Lebanon, as well as Lebanese abroad; women and girls from South and Southeast Asia, and increasingly East and West Africa, are subjected to domestic servitude in Lebanon; recruitment agencies continued to aggressively recruit foreign national domestic workers—sometimes through fraudulent or false job offers—particularly from Nigeria and the Philippines; most employers withhold domestic workers’ passports, and some withhold wages, force excessive work hours, restrict freedom of movement, and physically or sexually abuse them; NGOs and international organizations reported increased exploitation of Lebanese adults by Lebanese nationals, particularly in industries such as custodial services; women, primarily from Belarus, Moldova, Morocco, Russia, and Ukraine, enter Lebanon legally under the artiste visa program—which restricts the women from leaving the hotel where they live—and face physical and sexual abuse and domestic servitude; adults and children among the estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon are at high risk of sex and labor trafficking, sometimes at the hands of Syrian traffickers; refugee adults and children are held in bonded labor to pay for food, shelter, and transit and are sometimes contracted as groups to work in agriculture in the Beka’a Valley; forced child labor within the Syrian refugee population continued to rise, particularly in agriculture, construction, and street vending and begging; some of the children are forced or coerced to conduct criminal activity; Syrian refugee LGBTQI+ persons, women, girls, and some men are highly vulnerable to sex trafficking; some of the refugee women and girls are forced by family members into commercial sex acts or early marriage, and they are highly vulnerable to trafficking; Syrian and Lebanese nationals fleeing the economic crisis are vulnerable to sex trafficking in Turkey; non-state armed groups, including Hizballah, Fatah al-Islam, Jund Ansar Allah, Saraya al-Muqawama, and ISIS, recruited or used child soldiers in recent years; refugee children, particularly in Palestinian refugee camps, were especially vulnerable to recruitment or use as child soldiers (2023)

Illicit drugs

source country for amphetamine tablets destined for Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Libya and Sudan; source for captagon