Dominican Court Strip Citizenship from Children of Haitian Migrants

The Dominican court has reasoned that those Haitian farm workers were "in transit". So it is quite natural that their children are not entitled to automatic citizenship. Prior to the constitutional revisions of 2010, the government had been regularly granting citizenship automatically to any individual born within its borders even to the children of the parent who was "in transit" for a period more than 10 days. In 2007, the Electoral Council of the country, officially announced denial of citizenship to children born to illegal migrants. This decision of Dominican court that left thousands of people stateless may cause a human rights crisis.

A UN backed study has estimated that nearly 210,000 Dominican-born people of Haitian descent are living in the Dominican Republic who has very little or no tie with Haiti and neither they speak Creole and majority of them do not have any Haitian citizenship. Getting Haitian citizenship is more complicated to them because it is difficult to prove their Haitian descent. As per Dominican government estimate, there are some 500,000 people of Haitian origin live in their country.

The Haitian descents working in the Dominican Republic have historically been scapegoats for the problems within Dominican society. They always have been blamed for a variety of problem whether economic or criminal activity. They were often intentionally recruited to work as undocumented labor in construction, agricultural, or more recently in tourist industries.

The President of the Dominican Electoral Commission has said the government is not denying anyone the right to a nationality but legalizing the system through proper plan. The ruling given by the Constitutional court is final and cannot be appealed.

The electoral commission has been given one year time for producing a list of people who will be excluded from citizenship. However, no list has yet been prepared. Once it is created, it will take no more than 2 years for legalization.

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