Jamiaca’s PM awaits CARICOM position on Haitian citizenship issue

Jamaica and its CARICOM partners are expected to decide on a course of action to be taken with respect to the decision by the Dominican Republic to rescind the citizenship of immigrants, primarily of Haitian descent, who are living in the country. At a media briefing at the Office of the Prime Minister yesterday, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller told journalists that while her administration felt strongly about the issue, she would be awaiting CARICOM’s issuing of a joint statement on the matter, in the spirit of collective responsibility. At the same time, Michel Martelly, president of Haiti, noted that while his country harboured concerns about the decision of the Dominican Republic’s top court that all Haitian migrants who went to work in the country’s sugar-cane fields after 1929 were in transit, and thus their children were not automatically entitled to citizenship just because they were born there, it was fundamentally an issue for the Dominican Republic to resolve.

Courtesy: www.jamaicagleaner.com