Rights group: Lebanese residency laws put Syrians at risk

“Canada has now welcomed more than 10,000 Syrian refugees to our country”, a government statement said. I have to do whatever he says.

Another told HRW that the fact that his sponsor was his employer had locked him into an endless cycle of abuse and exploitation. Some trapped residents, including children, had died of starvation while others were driven to desperate measures, eating wild plants, cats and foraging for food in minefields.

“The main objective is to get all these people to work, and then there are the children who want to go to school now that the holidays are over”, said Mirakian, who led the group that saw the arrival of 700 newcomers in last four weeks. The report added that babies born to parents without legal status risk becoming stateless.

The new restrictions on renewal were adopted as part of the Lebanese authorities’ hardening stance toward Syrian refugees.

A child sits under a tent with Syrian refugee women attending a class on family planning organised by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) at a makeshift camp by Taybeh village, in Lebanon’s eastern Bekaa Valley, on November 15, 2015.

Before the new visa rules were implemented, the movement of people between Syria and Lebanon was largely unrestricted and Syrians were automatically allowed to remain in Lebanon for six months.

The funding will support the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan, known as 3RP, which covers the activities of some 200 government and non-governmental organisations in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. However, Lebanon is still bound by the customary worldwide law principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits returning people to places where they risk being persecuted, tortured, or exposed to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. According to the U.N. Refugee Agency, 70 percent of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon fall below the national poverty line of $3.84 per person per day.

While landing in Toronto and Montreal, refugees are also settling across the country.