LEBANON STATUS-QUO

Unfortunately, Lebanon has witnessed forced separation of children from their biological families resulting from complex factors while the civil war, the discrimination and violence practiced against women, the degradation of the civil government, the absence of civil laws, and the lack of support in accepting realities, and the absence of any organized technical support in the search for origins; All of that have added severe complications which perpetuations are still being lived and witnessed.

Within the absence of real effort to quantify the number of children who are invisible, Lebanon is facing a strong coming back of some of hundreds of persons, born in Lebanon during the war and adopted in families from Switzerland and Netherland, and other ex-patriot countries that might be strongly concerned like Canada, France, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, the USA and Australia.

Realizing their realities, the invisibles want to find answers for unshared questions, they need to know the whys and hows, they need to heal the sorrows and reduce the pain, they need to unclose the separation memories left there incarnated in their body and soul. They need to express out their identity and while understanding their individual pathway, they want to be able to give a voice and face to the invisibility and the secret the “mother” had to live through as well during all this years. Their only aspiration and hope is reconnecting with an earth on which they will be able to walk: their origins.

However, reconnecting separated children with the biological families is often complicated by a lack of formal documentation; without birth registration, or worse, with faked names registered, children are invisible in official statistics.

The right to origins is recognized by the extension of the human rights chart including children’s rights. The right to official birth registration and a nationality for “orphans” is ruled by the 1912 Lebanese Decree no 15.

In Lebanon the united nation’s children’ rights, human right and the Lebanese law itself are violated.