Frontiers Migration Statistics

Key Refugee and Migration

Statistics on Lebanon

Palestinian refugees

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reports that the number of officially registered Palestinian refugees in the country is approximately 390,000. This figure, which represented refugees who arrived in 1948 and their descendents, was presumed to include many thousands who actually reside outside of the country.

The actual number of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon is believed to be between 150,000 and 200,000.

In addition, according to conservative estimates there are at least 16,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who have government IDs but who are not registered with UNRWA. A smaller number (between 3000 and 5000) undocumented Palestinians in Lebanon are registered neither with UNRWA nor the government.

Non-Palestinian refugees

There were at least 2,528 refugees and asylum-seekers in Lebanon at the end of 2005, according to UNHCR statistics published in June 2006, though most of them had pending cases. Only 1,078 of these were fully recognized as refugees by UNHCR.

1019 new refugee applications were submitted to UNHCR in Beirut in 2005, 921 of these by Iraqis. More than 1400 applications were still pending at UNHCR-Beirut at the end of the year.

UNHCR-Beirut recognized 8.7 percent (23 cases, including 18 from Iraq) of the refugee applications that it decided in 2005.

It is not clear whether UNHCR statistics count all family members who are included on particular files.

UNHCR data exclude asylum-seekers who have received a final rejection by UNHCR and who are still in Lebanon. UNHCR’s refugee status determination procedures contain substantial gaps in fairness, and hence raise concerns that people in danger of persecution will be incorrectly rejected by UNHCR. Frontiers therefore defines rejected asylum-seekers who remaining Lebanon to be unrecognized refugees. However, there is no systematic data about how many unrecognized refugees are in the country.

Migrant workers and trafficked women

Catholic Relief Service, there are approximately 130,000 migrant workers in Lebanon, of whom 75 percent are female household workers.

According to the Directorate of General Security, there were 40,716 Sri Lankan, 29,426 Filipino and 19,993 Ethiopian migrant workers in Lebanon as of November 2005.

There are no official counts of the number of Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon.

In a Caritas survey of 601 employers, 91 percent of Lebanese said that it is their right to retain a domestic worker’s passport. Two percent said that it is acceptable to hit a domestic worker, and in practice 31 percent do so.

According to UN estimates, between 150,000 and 200,000 domestic workers in Lebanon, mostly from Asia and Africa, have suffered because their employers refused to renew their work permits.