As Lebanon marks three years this month since the devastating August 4, 2020 Beirut Port explosion, the country’s political elite are still far from being held to account—not those complicit in the deadly blast, nor those who have stolen billions of dollars from the Lebanese people and drained banks and public institutions of their funds, nor those responsible for targeted violence to silence political opposition. For years now, ordinary people have organized and taken to the streets to voice their rejection of the status quo; desperate depositors have pulled off bank heists for their own money; and international actors have made countless commitments to justice in Lebanon and condemnations of the ruling elites’ crimes. The lack of material progress to date belies a deep dysfunction in Lebanon’s judicial system.
Calls for reform to rectify this institutional failure have been met with fierce opposition by the country’s ruling elite, with legislation and politicking consistently being used to shield them from any financial or legal consequence. In recent years, targeted sanctions have been used as a tool to challenge corrupt practices, even though there has been wide consensus that additional mechanisms should be employed to put an end to the senseless abuse of power. Amid the institutionalized corruption and political paralysis that has come to characterize the Lebanese political arena, there has been an increased tightening on freedom of expression, as evident in activists being interrogated, the freedom-restricting amendments to the lawyer’s code of ethics, and the assaults on journalists.
On August 24, 2023, the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy hosted a discussion on the pervasive impunity of Lebanon’s political elite and the systems that obstruct accountability. In a conversation moderated by Reuters Levant Bureau Chief Maya Gebeily, panelists Omar Taleb, Zena Wakim, Lama Karamé, and Assad Thebian discussed what tools have yet to be leveraged to hold the Lebanese political elite accountable, why many international actors have yet to take decisive action against them, and the imperative necessity for immediate judicial reform.
Watch the discussion here:
Speaker Profiles:
Omar Taleb
Nonresident Fellow, The Tahrir Institute for Middle East PolicyOmar Taleb is a Nonresident Fellow at TIMEP focusing on impunity and access to justice in Lebanon. He is a Lebanese human rights lawyer with over eight years of experience in litigation. He does qualitative and quantitative research for a multitude of local and international organizations, much of which were published. Omar currently focuses on strategic litigation and advocacy, and provides protection for marginalized groups, including survivors of domestic violence, migrant domestic workers, and children at risk, and ensures legal guarantees for detainees. He also focuses on the need for officials to uphold the rule of law, by providing contemporary local and international legal jurisprudences and contemporary interpretation of legal scripts.
Lama Karame
Lawyer and Board Member of The Legal Agenda, Ph.D. Candidate at the University of OxfordLama Karamé is a lawyer and researcher, with a focus on public interest law and social justice. She is a board member of the Beirut-based NGO and research center, The Legal Agenda. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. in Socio-Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. She holds an LL.B. in public law from the Saint Joseph University of Beirut, a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the Lebanese University, and an LL.M. in law, culture, and society from SOAS, University of London. Lama was previously a visiting scholar at the Columbia Law School, researching the role of legal professions in promoting social justice.
Zena Wakim
International Lawyer, Accountability NowZena Wakim is an international lawyer qualified as a Swiss Attorney and Solicitor of England & Wales. She is currently the president of the Board of the Swiss foundation Accountability Now which assists civil society in its quest for accountability in Lebanon and most recently brought suit in Texas court for harm faced by U.S. citizens as a result of the Beirut Port Explosion. She also trained as a war crime investigator with the Institute for International Criminal Investigations in the Hague. She has focused her career on high-level geopolitically sensitive cases and sat as a board member of the Interpol Foundation for eight years.
Assad Thebian
Executive Director, Gherbal InitiativeAssaad Thebian is the Executive Director of Gherbal Initiative: a research center and think tank that advocates for more transparency and e-governance in Lebanon. He is also a founder of the 2015 YouStink Movement protesting the garbage crisis. He runs URIKA: a Beirut-based communications agency and won the ArabNet Creative Combat. He has a fascination with the letter P: Politics, Poetry, Philosophy, Photography, Psychology, Pi, Pythagoras Theory, People, Pets, Physics and Potatoes.
Maya Gebeily
Levant Bureau Chief, ReutersMaya is the Reuters bureau chief for Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. She previously covered the Middle East for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, writing about climate change, tech, socioeconomic developments and other trends shaping our region. She was a reporter for Agence-France Presse for six years, including in Baghdad and Beirut, and has reported as a freelancer out of Beirut, Istanbul, and the Kurdish region of Iraq.