About the “Citizen Rights” Guides program: 
 

Due to ignorance, confusion, repeated violations and lack of transparency, people are often unaware of their fundamental rights provided for in the law and International Instruments. In many situations, they find themselves obliged to pay bribes or waste their time trying to follow misleading instructions given by irresponsible civil servants. They are often unable to decide whether the situation they are facing requires resorting to a lawyer, a court, or not.
 

The main objective of the Citizen Rights Guides program is to achieve better accountability and transparency in the various legal fields related to Fundamental Freedoms and Human Rights from the practical perspective of the citizen user, through the production, publication and wide dissemination of informative, user-friendly guides that will meet three goals:
 

-          inform all persons living in Lebanon about their fundamental rights (extent and limits) in a simple and user-friendly manner;

-          provide them with practical recommendations as to the legal tools and processes that may allow them to exercise their rights effectively, and eventually, hold officials responsible for the violation of their rights;

-          provide citizens and activists with a critical assessment of the law, as compared to International Standards, in addition to practical policy recommendations to reach consistency of the law and practices with International Standards. Such assessment and recommendations are hoped to induce advocacy actions for change, leading to improved governance.
 

The Guides are informative in a way that the user will be sufficiently informed regarding their subject and would therefore be able to decide upon their reading – in the event they are facing a legal problem – which best course of action to follow to defend the given right.
 

            The Guides will hopefully increase the transparency of some legal rules that now often appear vague and complex to average people. The readers would have the sufficient literature to defend their case with their different interlocutors.
 

            The Guides will also be used to highlight the complexity of some legal procedures, their inconsistency with International Standards and the need to introduce modifications of the law or to the administrative practices for consistency.