BEIRUT: A group of lawyers said Friday that Speaker Nabih Berri told them the controversial new rent law could not go into effect as it currently stands, following a petition that called for the complete withdrawal of the legislation. In a meeting involving several tenants and the committee of lawyers that represent them, Berri said the Constitutional Council’s annulment of three articles had rendered the law ineffective, the head of the committee Adib Zakhour told The Daily Star.
Zakhour said the speaker called during the meeting MP Robert Ghanem, the head of Parliament’s Administration and Justice Committee, and told him that no MPs were to say that the law would become effective.
The move was the latest in a series of developments since the law was endorsed by Parliament in April, including several protests by tenants and counter protests by landlords.
The law will affect approximately 200,000 apartments – mostly in Beirut – that are governed under the old rent law that was in effect prior to 1992.
These tenants pay minimal rent fees that often amount to less than LL1,000,000 a year and are protected from rent hikes. The new law will see their rent rise incrementally over the next six years until it reaches 5 percent of the home’s value, and also gives landlords the right to take back the property after nine years without paying tenants compensation.
The new law was designed to soften the blow on low-income families by creating a fund to assist families whose salaries are under three times the minimum wage.
According to Nadine Bekdache, an Urban Planner who signed the petition calling for the withdrawal of the law, a safety net is not in place.
“[This fund] doesn’t really exist because the state doesn’t have a yearly account system,” Bekdache told The Daily Star. “This is the [article] that was annulled by the [Constitutional Council].”
Lebanon’s Constitutional Council annulled three of the law’s articles in August after the bill was challenged by a number of MPs.
“The law is made of 58 articles and even if two or three articles are annulled only, [the law] no longer becomes applicable,” Zakhour said.
But head of the Landlords Association Joseph Zogheib remained adamant that the law would be implemented; he said the Constitutional Council would have annulled the entire law if it was flawed.
Zogheib said Berri’s intentions were to fix the law to ensure that the special fund for tenants is included. He explained that the Landlords Association was working with Berri on an initiative on which more details would be released Monday.
“Be assured that [future amendments are] not on account of the landlords,” he said.
When asked about Berri’s stance, a source close to the speaker told The Daily star that the speaker had met delegations from both the tenants and the landlords and was working on resolving the issues surrounding the disputed articles in a way that would please both groups.
These developments came following news that prominent journalists, urban planners, architects, lawyers and academics signed a petition calling for the withdrawal of the law, which is set to come into effect on Dec. 28.
Signatories of the petition included several members of the press, as well as lawyer and founder of the NGO Legal Agenda Nizar Saghieh, Kamal Hamdan of the Consultation and Research Institute and Fawwaz Traboulsi, a writer and professor at the American University of Beirut.
An open letter to Parliament attached to the petition highlights several amendments that the signatories wish to see implemented before the law is passed. These include the construction of affordable housing for the most vulnerable tenants set to be evicted under the new law and a comprehensive and transparent survey to determine the social and economic situation of the tenants.
Bekdache, who has family that live under the old rent law, said there is no framework in place to determine which tenants would be eligible for aid from the aforementioned fund and that is why the petition is calling for a comprehensive survey prior to the drafting of a new law.
In its decision, the council also stated that the rent law violated tenants’ right to housing, a requirement that has been the main barrier to drafting new legislation since the old law was suspended in 1992.
Right to housing means developing affordable houses for low-income families and the elderly who will not be able to get bank loans or get back in the job market.
Zogheib argued that the government was providing incentives for companies to build “rent-to-own” properties that have low rent to address the affordable housing problem, and he believes that such property development is better left to the private sector.
While he acknowledged the new-law would be difficult to implement, he said it protected poor renters.
“This law was studied for 22 years, by several committees and several MPs and all the caucuses agreed on it,” Zogheib said. “It has protection for the poor renters but the ... well-off renters don’t need the protection. They should be paying like everyone else.”
Zogheib accused more well-off tenants of attacking the supplementary fund in order to encourage low-income tenants to support their protests. He went on to claim that some tenants have multiple properties and have “no businesses being under rent-control.”
In his eyes, this is a confrontation between the rights to private property and the Communist Party.
While confusion over the law lingers, the tenants remain in limbo over their future.
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