Citizen accountability is twofold, requiring both answerability and enforceability. Answerability is one’s right to receive a response from governing institutions, and in turn, his or her obligation to answer to these institutions. Enforceability compliments this by ensuring action and access to mechanisms and resources for redress.  Both these components can be best achieved through participatory processes, rights-based approach, and by cultivating a culture of civic engagement and activism through advocacy.

Memorialization project

The main objective behind this Project is to keep the memory of the victims alive in order to seek justice and accountability and holding the authorities responsible. Justice and accountability are at the core of this Project. Using MAAN’s extensive local and international experience in human rights and transitional justice, we will be documenting victims' stories objectively and accurately based on qualitative and quantitative data. Memorialization projects contribute to broader truth-telling and justice seeking processes. To seek justice is to demand accountability for those who are responsible towards the victims. It is imperative to keep pushing for accountability, in order not to let the spilled blood go to waste. The process will include the families of the victims at all stages through their testimonials. As they are one of the primary stakeholders, their participation is essential to the success of the initiative. The families will also be at the forefront of the call for justice and accountability, as their voices will be amplified.

MAAN aims at keeping the Beirut Port Explosion victims’ memory alive in order to recognize and ensure justice by holding the perpetrators accountable and promote cultures that respect human rights. Time enables victims and survivors to achieve perspective on the event and what they want to remember about it. Through memorialization, we seek to promote a culture of Human Rights. Depending heavily on storytelling and other methods of educating and reminding people about the past, memorialization relies substantially on documentary evidence. Following periods of gross human-rights violations, individuals tend to use different mechanisms to reconcile with the past. How to hold perpetrators accountable, how to recognize and ensure justice for the victims, and how best to nurture a culture of human rights, are some of the key questions that societies aim to address in the process of coming to terms with the past. Accountability and justice are at the core of this project. Questions of memory and memorialization are integral to how societies choose to remember and thus understand the past and how it affects the reconciliation process in the future. Memorialization is essential to truth-seeking and will be used as a tool to aim for accountability and broader justice efforts.

Research Papers

Social Security paper

The research focuses on Social Security in Lebanon and the challenges it faces, especially regarding the National Security Fund. The research introduces the concept of Social Safety, its history and its models, through a rights-based approach. A roadmap regarding the administration of the NSF is elaborated as a conclusion to the paper.