Dominican-Haitian relations
Stateless in Santo Domingo

Dec 16th 2011, 13:32 by D.R. | SANTO DOMINGO


LUISA FRANSUA sold clothes on the street to support her four children. Once they left home, she got a degree in educational psychology. But she has not been able to get a licence to practice her new profession, or renew her passport to visit her daughter in Germany. She was born in 1959 in the eastern Dominican Republic (DR), has never left her country, and her social-security card reads “Nationality: Dominican”. But the government now says she is a foreigner because her parents were Haitian.

For 75 years, the Dominican constitution granted citizenship to almost everyone born in the country. But since 2007 the government has sought to undo this legacy and annul the citizenship of people born to parents lacking legal residency, who are overwhelmingly Haitian. In October the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) received 457 complaints from people who say they have been left stateless after being recognised as citizens for decades. Some 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian origin could be affected. The IACHR has already condemned the policy. But on December 1st the Supreme Court gave the new rule constitutional sanction by rejecting a Dominican-born man’s request for a birth certificate so he could move to Florida after marrying an American.

Ever since Haiti, fresh off its slave rebellion, occupied the DR from 1821-44, Dominican leaders have stirred up anti-Haitian sentiment for political gain. In 1937 the dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered a mass murder of Haitians near the border. Joaquín Balaguer, his successor as strongman, famously warned of a “peaceful invasion” from the west. Relations improved when the Dominican government sent plentiful aid to Haiti following its 2010 earthquake. But the death on December 4th of Sonia Pierre (pictured), a renowned activist for Dominicans of Haitian descent, has refocused attention on the DR’s citizenship policy.

The only exceptions to the DR’s longstanding birthright-citizenship rule were for children of diplomats and people “in transit”—classified in 1939 as those who spent no more than 10 days in the country. Yet in 2004 Congress redefined “in transit” to include everyone without legal residency. And last year a new constitution denied citizenship to children of illegal immigrants.

Most legal experts assumed the policy would only apply to future newborns. But four years ago the government began using the criteria for everyone, without any public announcement. In the DR, birth certificates are required for tasks ranging from buying a mobile-phone contract to attending school to getting married, and they expire after 90 days (making them a moneymaker for the state, which charges to renew them). People who had replaced their certificates numerous times were suddenly rejected, and sometimes told to get their documents from Haiti.

The Supreme Court’s approval means the policy is unlikely to be reversed soon. In theory, the government could pass a law stopping it from being applied retroactively. But Leonel Fernández, the president, won a close 1996 run-off by running a campaign (with Mr Balaguer’s support) that warned that his dark-skinned opponent—whose Haitian parents fled Mr Trujillo’s massacre—sought to reunite the DR with Haiti. The DR’s representative to the OAS insists “there is no discriminatory state policy” and that the country merely wants to “modernise and clean up irregularities in its civil registry system”.

Yet Dominican-Haitian advocacy groups insist they will regain their rights eventually. The followers of Ms Pierre—who herself faced a request to annul her birth certificate— protested on the steps of the Supreme Court a week after the ruling. At her wake, they spoke of lobbying the United States to pressure the DR to comply with IACHR rulings. At the very least, they have symbolism on their side. The only splashes of colour in the drab yellow room where it was held were the sashes on the flower bouquets, the rouge on Ms Pierre’s cheeks as she lay in state and the brilliant blue and red of the Dominican flag draped over the foot of her casket.

Our blog post on Haitian-Dominicans

A response from the embassy of the Dominican Republic in the United States

Dec 27th 2011, 18:35 by The Economist

The Economist has received the following letter in response to a blog post on the citizenship rights of Dominican-Haitians. Our response is below.

SIR - Your online article, “Stateless in Santo Domingo”, inaccurately claims that the Dominican Republic has recently changed its citizenship policy, implying that the children of illegal Haitian parents have been deliberately targeted and discriminated against. However, the principles governing the citizenship rules of the Dominican Republic have been in place since 1929. From that year, the principle of jus soli contained in the Constitution of the Dominican Republic has been qualified by Paragraph 1, Article 11, which excludes from acquiring Dominican nationality the legitimate children of foreigners residing in the country on diplomatic missions or those who are in transit.

The Supreme Court of the Dominican Republic has repeatedly ruled on the matter of the children of illegal immigrants, whatever their origin, confirming that if those born to parents legally in transit are precluded from automatically acquiring the nationality, the children of those who cannot justify their legal entry or stay in the country cannot benefit from a greater right. However, despite your assertion to the contrary, statelessness is not at issue here. Given that Article 11 of the Haitian constitution establishes that “Any person born of a Haitian father or Haitian mother who are themselves native-born Haitians and have never renounced their nationality possesses Haitian nationality at the time of birth,” persons born within Dominican territory of Haitian parents are not stateless.

The Dominican Supreme Court has also ruled to affirm the legality of the measures implemented by the Dominican Central Electoral Board since 2007 to detect and correct the high number of irregularities that plague the Civil Registry. This urgent task is made more arduous by previously widespread weaknesses in the registry process.

These have generated a range of unlawful and potentially dangerous situations, from baseball players using fraudulent birth certificates to hide their true age to criminals acquiring multiple identities through forged documents. They have also masked previous irregularities in the issue of birth certificates to the children of foreign parents who had not proven their residency or legal status in the Dominican Republic.

The Central Electoral Board has a mandate to investigate suspected irregularities in the Civil Registry and subject these to the scrutiny of the courts. The investigation, and possible future annulment, of a civil registry document, such as a birth certificate, does not contravene domestic legislation. Nor does it violate international human rights commitments undertaken by the Dominican Republic if those affected are entitled to a different nationality.

As part of its mandate for transparency, the Central Electoral Board did, however, evaluate upon the request of a local NGO a number of decisions made to suspend, pending investigation, the release of copies of birth certificates. The number of cases submitted to the Board was 120, not 457. Of these, 80 have been answered and 20 were returned to the petitioners due to lack of sufficient documentation.

The Dominican Republic cannot be asked to shoulder the consequences of the serious deficiencies that plague the Haitian civil registry. Neither can it be expected, as in fact has been said in many of the comments elicited by your post, to bear the brunt of the human and economic costs of the dire situation faced by the Haitian people, for which they see no better solution than to emigrate across an extremely porous border to the Dominican Republic.

Aníbal de Castro
Ambassador
Embassy of the Dominican Republic
Washington, DC

The Economist responds:

As our blog post states, in 2004 the Dominican Congress redefined the “in transit” category, extending it from people who had spent no more than ten days in the country to include everyone without legal residency. Three years later, the government stopped recognizing as citizens people born in the country whose parents had thus been reclassified as “in transit”, no matter how long they had lived in the DR.

The people affected by these new criteria could conceivably request Haitian citizenship. However, since the DR refuses to give them a birth certificate, they have no way to prove to Haitian authorities that their parents were Haitian. Meanwhile, they are stateless.

The blog post also accurately states that 457 cases were presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, not to the Dominican Republic's Central Electoral Board.

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