The underlying reasons behind issuing the health, environment, educational, heritage, public safety, and public funds charters include improving the citizen’s relationship with the public administration, promoting democracy in the public sector, achieving transparency, protecting the citizen from the arbitrary use of authority, and enforcing the accountability system.

While focusing on the rights and obligations of citizens, these charters serve not only as informative tools but also contribute to setting up detailed principles with specific application machineries.

Herein resides the importance of exposing and discussing these charters in workshops attended by all concerned parties—particularly civil society organizations—to take into account different views and to raise awareness regarding the significance of committing to their contents. The final drafts of these charters will be presented to the Council of Ministers.

The responsibility to preserve and guard the Lebanese heritage, with all the physical and intellectual cultural values it represents, is greatly emphasized in our current times as many of its elements can be seriously damaged, destroyed, or fall into oblivion due to the prevailing economic and social conditions. Nations all around the world are striving today to preserve their heritage and highlight its importance and value through various programs and policies, particularly through the introduction of the different heritage elements into society. This can only be accomplished through the combined efforts of the government, concerned NGOs, educational institutions, media, and citizens.

The main axes of the charter include:

• Heritage in the daily life: family, educational institutions, and the media. The family’s obligations to raise awareness of children regarding their national heritage, habits and customs. The educational institutions’ obligations to establish relevant educational programs, encourage research and studies, and instill the sense of respect of habits and customs. The axis also deals with the obligations of the media and their active role in raising awareness about the subject.
• Protecting the heritage: participation and solidarity. The different obligations of the central authority, municipalities and non-governmental organizations.
• Particularity and globalization of the heritage: the traditional Lebanese production is threatened by unrestricted competition and external traditions which emphasizes the need to create a database of geographical indicators for local Lebanese products and to protect them as well as to adopt a special system for geographical designations for Lebanese products in view of protecting them within the framework of the WTO and the EU.

This charter is directed at the public administration at large including (a) civil servants, (b) any person who receives salaries or indemnities from public funds, (c) any person who spends or manages public funds, (d) any tax-paying citizen, (e) any citizen that benefits from public services, and (f) non-governmental organizations such as informatory and educational institutions and syndicates.
The charter strives to promote the public administration’s democratic approach in dealing with the citizen as a tax payer and a beneficiary of public services. Its main axes include:

Public funds in the daily life: any fund-related activity by the government is an immediate concern of the citizen. Low-quality development projects constitute a clear manifestation of the ill-management of public funds that ultimately affects the citizen’s quality of life.

Building tax-related citizenship: any citizen who contributes has the right to participate in public life and ask for accounts; politics in its general understanding is the management of public interest to the benefit of tax-paying citizens whose tax-related awareness starts at home, in school, and in society.

The philosophy of monitoring: Considered as a basic democratic principle for the execution of the budget, monitoring is used to ensure that the executive authority doesn’t exceed the expense limit set by the legislative authority.

Building the citizen’s trust: The citizen must feel confident that the taxes he/she pays are effectively used in the interest of the public.

The Citizen’s Public Safety Charter

This charter focuses on six priority axes: public safety in daily life, public works contracts, pursuing and punishing violators, complaints of citizens, public safety and limiting damage in natural disasters, and methodology of spreading public safety awareness.
The disdain of public safety rules is closely linked to cultural factors, mostly the belief that the use of safety prevention equipments and tools damages an otherwise fearless and heroic self-image. Moreover, people think that using these equipments and tools may obstruct their movements, delay their achievement of a certain task, or even lessen the accuracy of their work.
Comprising 327 articles, the charter addresses the following main points:
The overlapping prerogatives related to traffic and roads; the necessity to include public safety standards and procedures in public works contracts; controlling the conflict of responsibilities among the different executive authorities in the application of laws related to public safety; issuance of legislations with clear penalties applied on violators who threaten public safety; introduction of public safety principles at all levels of the curricula of educational institutions; raising awareness of the painful and distressing consequences of disregarding basic public safety rules; building a collective memory and constructing reminding monuments in public places; and speeding up court judgments in cases related to public safety.