Assembling Evidence for a Land and Property Restitution Database during the Syrian Civil War
Publisher: World Bank
Author(s): Jon Unruh
Date: 2016
Topics: Data and Technologies, Governance, Land
Countries: Syrian Arab Republic
The enormity of the refugee population generated by the Syrian civil war will present significant dilemmas for land and property restitution once the war ends. While postwar mass claims programs are widely applied and comprise a variety of valuable techniques, they also have a number of highly problematic flaws. They are extremely costly, require significant periods of time to implement, politically unstable, require capacity in personnel and infrastructure that are usually well beyond a postwar state, are often overwhelmed by the large volume of claims, are overly dependent on statutory documentary evidence, constitute a form of 'rough justice' that can marginalize potentially volatile segments of society, and can be easily compromised by the large number of fraudulent, frivolous and 'beyond mandate' claims. This paper reports on a project that investigates how to attend to these issues by assembling innovative forms of evidence into a cadaster-database during the war.