Key recommendations:

• International partners should encourage and support Lebanon to maintain a proportionate security response while taking more action to ensure both relief and progress on addressing issues that are creating tension and could prove destabilising.

• Stability, social cohesion and prosperity can be advanced by offering all refugees legal status and abandoning security measures that are creating unnecessary fears among refugees, such as arbitrary arrest/detention, evictions and forcible returns.

• Donors should encourage the establishment of fair, clear and affordable procedures for Syrian refugees to register and remain legally in Lebanon until there is a peace to return to in Syria. They should also urge Lebanon to ratify the UN Refugee Convention and support it to adopt fair national procedures to assess refugee claims.

• Providing refugees with greater economic and legal security would increase their spending power, boost the economy of host communities, create jobs, reduce the concentration of Syrian labour in low paid, informal jobs and lessen the ‘race to the bottom’ in wages and workers’ rights.

• By making it easier for Syrian males to move without fear of arbitrary arrest, detention and other abuses, authorities can ease Syrian women and girls’ exposure to harassment, exploitation and denigration.

• Supporting empowerment of refugee and host communities, including through community security programming – can help to ensure stronger accountability for how security is provided and foster trust between communities, informal actors and authorities to identify and solve security challenges together. Such approaches can prove highly effective even in contexts affected by hard security challenges.

• Beyond pressing for the protection of refugees’ rights in Lebanon, donor governments must themselves take greater responsibility for hosting Syrian refugees. This would be a concrete way to support Lebanon and would also enhance their credibility when promoting refugee rights. They should also redouble efforts to work towards a just peace in Syria.