The Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic ruled on Thursday that anyone born in the country after 1929 to undocumented immigrant parents would lose their citizenship.
Formerly, the Dominican Republic granted citizenship to anyone born on its soil. But starting in 2007, electoral authorities began denying identity documents to Dominicans of Haitian descent. Three years later, the government approved a new constitution stating that citizenship will be granted only to those born in the country to at least one parent of Dominican blood or whose foreign parents are legal residents.
Citing the 2010 constitution, Thursday’s ruling deemed that any Haitian migrants that came to work in the Dominican sugarcane fields since 1929 were seasonal workers “in transit,” and that their children were not entitled to automatic citizenship.
The Court said officials are studying birth certificates of more than 16,000 people, and gave the Electoral Commission one year to produce a list of people to be excluded from citizenship. The ruling overwhelming affects the estimated 1 million individuals of Haitian descent, throwing them into legal limbo.
Reed Brody, a spokesperson for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that the ruling “cuts against the rights of thousands of people born in the Dominican Republic, and could immediately undermine their access to education and health services.” Some activists have said that they will contest the ruling before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
The decision will likely exacerbate already sour relations between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, who share the Caribbean island of Hispaniola and have a long history of conflict, including a massacre of 20,000 Haitians that was orchestrated by former Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1937. Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe did not issue a statement in response to the ruling.
