With no end in sight to the ongoing two-year conflict in Syria, both the Lebanese authorities and host communities are struggling to cope with the sheer number of Syrian refugees fleeing into the country.

According to the Beirut Institute – an independent non-partisan think tank in the region – more than 1.2 million refugees have now fled war-torn Syria into Lebanon, a country with a population of only four million people.

Furthermore Lebanon is projected to host 80,000 Syrian-Palestinian refugees and 49,000 Lebanese returnees by the end of the year according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

The current Lebanese government has so far maintained an “open-door” policy along the Syrian border to allow refugees and those seeking asylum to transit into the country.

However, U.N. support notwithstanding, it has become clear that this policy is not sustainable in the long term. The UNHCR currently places the needs of Syrian refugees in Lebanon alone at 1.7 billion dollars.

With the crisis across the border growing exponentially, the impact of such an increase in population on local areas has put a particular strain on Lebanon’s infrastructure, especially within host communities (those living closest to the camps).

In an Apr. 3 roundtable on “Ethics and Politics: Response to the Plight of Refugees”, the Beirut Institute stated that without substantial external investment from international donors or aid agencies, the current infrastructure in place in Lebanon will neither be able to provide adequate “shelter, healthcare (and) education” nor enough jobs to those with refugee status or local host communities.

In a follow-up press briefing at the U.N. headquarters on Jul. 8, former Lebanese Minister of Interior and Municipalities Zayad Baroud told journalists that “Beirut cannot be held solely responsible” for refugees migrating into Lebanon, stating that it “should not be seen as a purely bilateral issue.”

Whilst reiterating points made by the Beirut Institute’s roundtable earlier this year, Baroud also used Lebanon’s current caretaker government and worsening security situation – poignantly exemplified today by the explosion of a car bomb in a Hezbollah stronghold of south Beirut – as further grounds for greater international funding.

He claimed that “stability is about democracy” and security, therefore “the caretaking government cannot address the Syrian crisis (for long).”

“Humanitarian aid assistance to the refugees should continue, but at the same time it should be initiated in a way that addresses the financial needs of schools and hospitals, which today are under huge pressure. The funding to NGOs is not enough to help this crisis,” Baroud said.

Miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions were central themes to the “Moving away from the death penalty” discussion at the United Nations last week, where Damien Echols – one of the wrongly convicted “West Memphis Three” – joined the panel.

Introduced by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who declared Echols as “one of too many people around the world who [had] endured the nightmare of injustice, compounded by the threat of death”, called again for a permanent abolishment of the death penalty worldwide.

Furthermore, the Secretary General called for an increase in judicial transparency and a continuation of the U.N. General Assembly’s 2007 call for a worldwide moratorium on capital punishment, calling it a “stepping stone towards full worldwide abolition”.

Since 2007, six more countries have abolished the death penalty, with Benin and Mongolia in line to follow suit this year, according to the U.N.

The discussion follows the release of Amnesty International’s 2012 annual report about the judicial use of the death penalty worldwide. According to the report the overall number of convictions fell from 1,923 convictions in 63 countries in 2011 to 1,722 convictions in 58 countries in 2012. However, the number of executions that took place rose by two to 682.

With a theme set by the presence of Damien Echols and an introductory clip from the documentary “The West Memphis Three” – which followed his extraordinarily long and harrowing journey negotiating his wrongful conviction – the discussion focussed on the inherent human errors, corruption, misuse of evidence, cost and personal goals within the judicial system that resulted in “people paying the ultimate price for miscarriages of justice,” according to Ban Ki-moon.

Such examples were rife in the procedural phase of Echols’ conviction, whereby a lack of evidence, false confessions, cognitive bias and ulterior motives fuelled the prosecution case.

Yet it is not purely the emblematic cases that should be highlighted, said Saul Lehrfreund, an executive director of The Death Penalty Project United Kingdom.

“I am concerned about those non-high profile cases, where you have a confession statement given to a police officer, where there is no video recording, no lawyer present, and that person ends up on death row” Lehrfreund said.

Furthermore, Brandon L. Garrett, author of ‘Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong,’ spoke of the fact that race and minority groups, as well as those living in poverty or with mental incapacities, were those dominantly suffering due to the systematic failings of state specific judiciary systems.

With a focus on the procedural processes of countries with the death penalty – particularly the United States. – the discussion concluded with Chair Ivan Šimonović, Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, rhetorically asking; “Is even one innocent life worth what we get in return for retaining the death penalty?”.