Stateless people

The United Nations human rights office has urged the Dominican Republic to take all necessary measures to ensure that citizens of Haitian origin are not deprived of their right to nationality in light of a recent court ruling.Last week the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the children of undocumented migrants who have been in the Dominican Republic and registered as Dominicans as far back as 1929, cannot have Dominican nationality as their parents are considered to be “in transit”. “We are extremely concerned that a ruling of the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court may deprive tens of thousands of people of nationality, virtually all of them of Haitian descent, and have a very negative impact on their other rights,” said Ravina Shamdasani, the spokesperson for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHR). She said the decision could have “disastrous” implications for people of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, leaving them in a state of constitutional limbo and without access to basic services for which identity documents are required. Until 2010, the UN said the Dominican Republic had followed the principle of automatically bestowing citizenship to anyone born on its soil. But in 2010, it said a new constitution stated that citizenship would be granted only to those born on Dominican Republic soil to at least one parent of Dominican blood or whose foreign parents are legal residents. The decision, which cannot be appealed, gives the Central Electoral Board one year to elaborate a list of people to be excluded from citizenship, and it outlines a number of steps leading to the elaboration of a regularization plan for undocumented migrants, OHCHR said.

Courtesy: www.cananewsonline.com