The situation in the Dominican Republic gives some insight into what happens when a country with a large immigrant population decides to end birthright citizenship. Read more hereand here.—TPOI editor
By Robin Guittard, IPS
May 23, 2017 |
| Photo: Upside Down World |
MEXICO CITY, May 23 2017 (IPS) - Three years ago today, authorities in the Dominican Republic
passed a law seeking to address a statelessness crisis that has effectively stripped thousands of people off their Dominican nationality and with it, denied them a range of human rights.The crisis exploded in 2013, after a ruling by the Dominican Republic’s top Court that retroactively applied to anyone born after 1929 to undocumented foreign parents. In practice, it disproportionately affected Dominicans of Haitian descent in a context of an island shared by two nations: Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
The largest statelessness crisis ever seen in the Americas was unleashed, with four generations of people being legally erased from the map and turned into ghost citizens, with no rights and no future – unable to enroll in school, apply for regular jobs or facing difficulty in seeing a doctor. An international outcry followed.[…]
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