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Access to legal identity and civil documentation – such as the documentation of births, marriages, and deaths – is a basic human right and a prerequisite to the realisation and enjoyment of a number of other civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including health and education. Moreover, possessing documentation is critical to reducing protection risks, ensuring access to incomegenerating opportunities and securing HLP assets. In the context of displacement, the rights to legal identity and HLP are essential to achieving durable solutions and providing a foundation on which Syrians can sustainably rebuild their lives.
Proving legal identity can be a major challenge for many Syrian refugees who, after years of displacement, have been unable to obtain, replace, or update civil documentation. Access to civil documentation is inextricably linked to HLP rights, which are contingent on a person’s ability to prove their identity and family lineage. A lack of civil documentation can thus severely limit opportunities, and further compound the challenges that Syrian refugees face to exercise their HLP rights.10 Both of these issues can have significant protection implications during displacement, and in the longer term, can make durable solutions harder to achieve and negatively affect future recovery efforts.
Given the scale of these challenges in the Syria context, during 2020, UNHCR and NRC undertook research focused on key civil documentation and HLP challenges faced by Syrian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq from a durable solutions perspective.11 The issues of death registration, civil registration for families with missing relatives, and the link between a lack of civil documentation and the enjoyment of HLP rights were identified as warranting more in-depth research. The HLP rights of women and other marginalised groups also formed a central focus of the research and analysis presented below. Although not the focus of the report, Palestine refugees from Syria are likely to face many of the same challenges related to civil documentation and HLP rights as Syrian nationals.
This report starts with an examination of the relevant legal frameworks and then presents an overview of the challenges faced by Syrian refugees related to realising their rights to legal identity and HLP in displacement. The report concludes with a series of practical recommendations addressed to the Syrian and host governments, humanitarian actors and donors regarding how to support and improve access to legal identity and HLP rights in the context of durable solutions. With regards to Syria, the study considers the rights and legal framework promulgated by the Government of Syria.
