Democratization & Human Rights

Explore the monthly memo for an in-depth overview of the Lebanese State's legislative activity in April 2024 by our partner The Policy Initiative Have a look at these infographics. In April 2024, the Lebanese State issued 101 legislative texts, yet none introduced the much-needed reforms. 

"The 'Change Bloc' in Lebanon's Parliament, formed following the May 2022 parliamentary elections, encountered significant hurdles, including internal divisions and strategic disagreements, eventually leading to its collapse. This report unveils the main factors behind this downfall through highlighting the differences in their political visions and exploring how these challenges impacted the bloc's cohesion and effectiveness.

The Anne Klein Women’s Award 2023 goes to Joumana Seif, lawyer, a human and women‛s rights activist, born in 1970 in Damascus, Syria. She spent the past years living in forced exile in Berlin. Since 2001, she has been courageously active in her fight for and commitment to women’s rights. For her, women's rights are human rights. It is thanks to activists like her that sexualized violence has been classified as a systematically used weapon of war and that it can be legally prosecuted and sentenced in international proceedings as a crime against humanity.

Joumana Seif is a Syrian lawyer and a feminist. She is a legal advisor in International Crimes and Accountability program at the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), with a particular focus on Syria and sexual and gender-based violence. She worked on the al-Khatib trial before the Higher Regional Court of Koblenz by closely supporting the survivors.

Help knows no borders. There are many people who are willing to take in survivors of the earthquakes in Syria and Turkey. Medical support in the stricken areas is desperately needed. But this will require support at political level.

Anne Klein Women's Award 2023 to Joumana Seif, lawyer and co-founder of the Syrian Women's Network from Damascus, Syria

Syrian lawyer Joumana Seif is the 2023 Anne Klein Women's Laureate. She strives for the political participation of women and the recognition of gender-based violence as a crime against humanity as well as its punishment. Kristin Helberg describes her journey from Damascus to Berlin.

What is the role of an observation mission and why is it important to ensure a transparent and democratic path towards elections. International election observation missions must execute their work in line with a country’s constitutional provisions and electoral laws, and within international and regional democratic and human rights instruments, making the intervention necessary, especially in cases where people are victimized and living under dire conditions due to state failure, and where the course of electoral process seems to be at risk.

It is rare for societies to be transformed beyond recognition in a short span of time. When such historical moments happen, they are usually caused by wars or foreign invasions. But war is not what is happening in Lebanon, at least not yet. In the throes of what the World Bank described as one of the worst financial and economic crises globally since the mid-nineteenth century, Lebanon is undergoing a painful process of social disintegration, whose consequences can be seen in almost all aspects of social existence. 

The biggest uprising in the country’s history, one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in the twenty-first century, a global pandemic, and now one of the worst socio-economic crises in the world… In the last two years, Lebanon has been transformed beyond recognition, has unraveled beyond limits.