Lebanese lawyer, admitted to the Beirut Bar Association in 2016, with more than ten years of litigation before every level of the Lebanese courts. Her country evidence work rests on that practice: the confessional personal status system and what it means for women and children, civil registry and identity records, and the point at which state protection stops working.
Lebanon is a confessional state, and that shapes most protection claims arising from it. Personal status sits with the religious courts of eighteen recognised communities, so marriage, divorce, custody and inheritance are decided by the rules of the community a person belongs to, with no civil alternative. I can set out what this means for a particular applicant: which court would hear the matter, what outcome the law of that community produces, and why women, children and people in mixed or unregistered families are left without remedy.
The second strand is documentation. I work daily with Lebanese civil registry and court records and can say whether a document is consistent with issuing practice, what a missing or unregistered entry means for nationality and status, and how an applicant would prove civil status where the registry has no record of them.
The third is state protection. Ten years of litigation before the Lebanese courts gives me a view of how prosecutors, police and the judiciary behave in practice, how far the economic and institutional collapse since 2019 has degraded them, and where the distance lies between a right on paper and its availability to someone seeking protection.
Beyond Lebanon I work across Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, where Arabic language court and civil registry documents follow comparable conventions and where the same questions about access to state protection arise.
Admitted to the Beirut Bar Association in 2016 and in legal practice for over ten years, appearing before every level of the Lebanese courts: managing disputes, conducting legal research, attending hearings, filing proceedings and drafting pleadings. Legal Counsel since 2024, previously Senior Associate at Rasma Legal from 2020 to 2024 and Junior Associate at Elie Helou Law Office from 2016 to 2020. Master of Laws with distinction and Bachelor of Laws with distinction, Lebanese University. Available for country conditions reports, document verification and legal system analysis for proceedings in the United Kingdom and the United States.
English: Full professional proficiency
French: Full professional proficiency