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Modest official measures to protect children in Lebanon

22-1-2018

In its efforts to end discriminatory practices against children, the director general of Personal Status, Brigadier Elias Khoury, distributed a circular on January 19 to all registrars asking them not to include the term ‘illegitimate newborn’ in all personal status registers, like the identity card and personal and family birth records, and to replace them with the term ‘invalid legal standing’. Al Mustaqbal newspaper wrote that, while the new directive alleviates the ‘moral’ side effect of the phrase, the illegitimate newborn infant remains deprived of his personal rights, namely inheritance and related matters. In this respect, parliamentary committees are still studying the marriage of children as well as the child protection draft bills. According to L’Orient Le Jour, the said committee discussed during a session on January 17 the draft laws related to child marriage and the exceptions the confessional institutions fight to keep concerning the age of marriage. Concerning cyber-crimes, the officer at the Cybercrime Office of the Internal Security Force, Lieutenant Elias Dagher, revealed the recoding of some 3,200 cases in the past year. Such crimes, Dagher clarified, involved murder and rape cases, in addition to crimes of sextortion, fraud and theft. Dagher who was speaking during a lecture on ‘social media crimes’ said that in 2014 alone more than 100 underage girls (the oldest being 13 years) were victims of online predators, sustaining that they have been groomed and blackmailed on Facebook before being raped. (L’Oient Le Jour, Al Mustaqbal, January 17, 20, 2018)

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