EUROPEAN aid sent to Lebanon in an attempt to regulate migration by sea is funding practices that violate human rights, according to a damning report published by Human Rights Watch today.
As part of a policy of containing migration, authorities in Cyprus have physically pushed Syrian refugees back to Lebanon and Lebanese security agencies have deported them, the New York-based group said.
The report, based on interviews with 16 Syrians who tried to leave Lebanon in smugglers’ boats, found that 15 of them had “suffered human rights violations at the hands of Lebanese and/or Cypriot authorities.”
Lebanon, which has been in the throes of a severe financial crisis since 2019, hosts around 775,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands more who are unregistered, giving it the world’s largest refugee population per capita.
The Lebanese government has an agreement with Cyprus to halt the smuggling of migrants and has received substantial funding for border control from the European Union and European countries.
In some cases, Syrian refugees who were caught by the Lebanese army attempting to reach Cyprus by sea have been driven to the Lebanon-Syria border and dumped on the Syrian side, Human Rights Watch said.
Human Rights Watch also accused Cypriot authorities of forcibly turning back boats carrying asylum-seekers coming from Lebanon.
In some cases, they forcibly prevented asylum-seekers from landing, while in other cases, those who made it ashore “were not given the opportunity to claim asylum” and were instead detained and then returned to Lebanon, where some were then deported to Syria, the report said.
“Both Lebanese and Cypriot authorities used excessive force at the time of arrest and during detention,” Human Rights Watch said.
The EU and European countries gave Lebanon some €16.7 million (£14m) from 2020 to 2023 to fund 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 a statement, Cyprus’s Deputy Ministry of Migration and International Protection denied that there had been any pushbacks.
Lebanon’s General Security agency told Human Rights Watch that between January 1 2022 and August 1 2024, 1,388 people on 15 departing boats had been caught attempting to leave Lebanon.
Beate Gminder, acting head of the European Commission’s directorate-general for migration and home affairs, said the commission “takes allegations of wrongdoings very seriously,” but that it is the responsibility of national authorities to “investigate any allegations of violations of fundamental rights” and to prosecute wrongdoing.
