Judicial Review or Institutionalized Racism? The Denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian Descent
by Andrea Verdeja
The Dominican Republic has recently been at the center of a very tense international human rights controversy, following the denationalization of around 200,000 Dominican citizens of direct or remote Haitian descent. According to the Dominican Republic’s 1929 constitution, which was valid until 2010, Dominican citizenship could be acquired by two means: (1) through Jus Sanguinis, if either or both parents already held Dominican citizenship or (2) through Jus Soli, if the individual was born on Dominican soil; except, those born to parents “in transit.” This clause was originally stipulated to account for children of foreign diplomats that were born in the country, but were living there only temporarily or transitionally.
In 2007, the Dominican government passed Resolution 12-07, which granted state officials the authority to deny access to or indefinitely withhold any legal documents of individuals whose parents could not prove they had regular legal status in the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth.(i) Within this context, all illegal immigrants residing in the Dominican Republic were considered to be “in transit,” and therefore their children, albeit being born on Dominican soil, did not have a right to citizenship according to the 1929 Constitution.
In practical terms, this meant that anyone who was currently a Dominican citizen but whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (essentially any ancestor dating back to 1929) could not prove regular legal status would have their national identification documents confiscated and their nationality revoked, as citizenship was “mistakenly” and unlawfully awarded to them in the past. In order to regain a legal status in the country, former-Dominican citizens would have to register as foreigners and re-apply for Dominican naturalization in their countries of origin. Similarly, recently born children of undocumented parents were denied their birth certificates under the same rationale through Resolution 12-07. This changed in 2010, when a Constitutional reform specifically clarified that children of illegal immigrants were not entitled to automatic Dominican citizenship through Jus Solis, effectively abolishing birthright citizenship(ii) as many countries around the world have done recently. In September 2013, after six years of appeals claiming that the denationalization of Dominican citizens through Resolution 12-07 violated the country’s constitution, the highest Dominican judicial court, the Constitutional Tribunal, concluded through Ruling 168-13 that the resolution was constitutionally valid and converted the decree into a law.
The complex and delicate implications of this ruling acquire a very distinct light when taking into account the socio-political, economic and demographic reality of the Dominican Republic and its historical relations to Haiti, with whom it shares the island of Hispaniola. As the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti’s harsh economic reality and tumultuous political strife have forced thousands of Haitians to cross the border in search of employment opportunities and an overall better quality of life. This caused the Dominican Republic, with a total population of 10 million people, to have nearly one million Haitian immigrants currently living within its borders, many of them illegally. Inevitably, this situation represents a severe problem for the Dominican Republic, where already over 40% of its own population lives under the extreme poverty line and has no access to basic public services.(iii) After Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the mass illegal influx of Haitian immigrants was only aggravated. For many Dominicans, this reality has stirred deep fears and concerns, pointing out that the country cannot even look after its own population, let alone take care of Haitian immigrants whose presence further exacerbates the problem by draining the country of its already scarce services and resources. The 168-13 ruling, therefore, is not merely a judicial review: it is specifically meant to target Haitian immigrants and the several subsequent generations that have by now been born and raised in the Dominican Republic.
Beyond the economic disparity between both countries and the language, and the resulting mass illegal immigration of Haitians that has sparked a backlash of fearful and defensive nationalist Dominican sentiments, a long history of prevalent Dominican-Haitian ethnic tensions further complicates the scenario. The two countries’ conflict-filled past ranges all the way from military occupation, state-sponsored genocide, and wide-spread human trafficking to institutionalized racial discrimination.
Following their independence from France in 1804, Haiti militarily invaded the Dominican Republic (at the moment still a Spanish colony) and occupied it for a period of 22 years. Dominicans claimed their independence from Haiti in 1844 through an armed insurgency, and ever since relations between both countries have been very unstable. Existing racial and cultural differences have developed through time as a source of great discord between both national groups. While Dominicans are predominantly mulatos (mixture of white colonials and black slaves), Haitians are by contrast overwhelmingly black, as there was no mixture between slaves and colonials – consequently making both national groups easily and racially distinguishable from the other. In addition to race, both groups are further divided through language and religious differences, Dominicans being Spanish-speaking and Catholic while Haitians speak French and Creole and practice voodoo.
Over time, Dominican national and cultural identity evolved to be heavily based on rejecting anything and everything that was related to Haiti, whose symbolic and demographic blackness was equated with backwardness, poverty and historically with military invasion and oppression. During the Trujillo dictatorship era of 1930-1961 in the Dominican Republic, an enormous emphasis was put on becoming a “civilized” and modern country. This meant re-writing Dominican history text-books and reshaping a national collective imagery that would reject Dominicans’ half-black ancestry and instead solely highlight their partially white European heritage. This anti-black Dominican national identity was ultimately embodied in an aggravated form of anti-Haitianism, its most infamous example being Trujillo’s orchestration of 1937 Parsley Massacre (also known as El Corte) of 10,000-25,000 Haitians living in the Dominican border in order to “whiten” and purify the Dominican race.(iv) Facing potential economic and political sanctions from the Organization of American States (OAS) as a consequence of his atrocities, Trujillo further took advantage of the situation by welcoming a great number of white European refugees before and during WWII in order to waive the sanctions and regain international sympathy. Ultimately contributing to his “race whitening” project, large groups of Jewish and Spanish refugees who were respectively feeing from Hitler’s and Franco’s regimes immigrated into the country.
Despite widespread hatred for negritude and in particularly anti-Haitianism being embedded within Dominican national identity, an undeniable reality is that Haitian immigrants have helped sustain the Dominican economy for decades by supplying an abundant source of cheap labor. Primarily working in the sugar cane and banana plantations or in the booming construction industry, Haitian immigrants often work under exploitive and/or inhumane conditions and are in some cases even deported without pay through lucrative human trafficking rings. This has been for a long time at the heart of a large wave of attacks and denouncements made against the Dominican Republic by numerous international organizations and human rights advocates as well as by international media.
It is within this broader context of Dominican/Haitian tensions that the recent TC 168-ruling has effectively left thousands of Dominican citizens of Haitian decent without permission to work, continue their studies, or access any kind of public service including healthcare. Being rendered inexistent within the legal system, the affected population does not have any documentation to stay in the country, nor leave it to go back to Haiti. Moreover, because it is being applied on a retroactive basis as far back as four or five generations, many of the affected Dominicans have no cultural, political, familiar, religious or linguistic ties to their original Haitian roots, having been born and raised as Dominicans their entire lives. This makers the proposed naturalization plan of requiring them to register as foreigners, go back to Haiti without even speaking the language, and re-apply for naturalization quite problematic.
Immediately following the ruling, the Dominican Republic has been met with wide-spread indignation and condemnation from the international community, plunging the country into an international human rights scandal that has resulted in ruptured diplomatic ties and severed geopolitical relations. The ruling has been publicly condemned by the OAS, the EU, the US government, as well as by many UN agencies including the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, who believe the ruling violates fundamental human rights.(v) In addition, following an initiative spearheaded by the Prime Ministers of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) voted to block the Dominican Republic’s bid for membership to its regional economic grouping, deeming the ruling xenophobic.(vi) The sentence has been further denounced by numerous NGOs and human rights advocates across the world as an act of civil genocide, ethnic cleansing, newly instated apartheid and racist bigotry, further calling for the international boycott of the Dominican tourism industry and its expulsion from international organizations.
Though the Dominican public is deeply divided on the issue, there has been a strong nationalist defense of the ruling. Many feel that the plethora of international accusations against the Dominican Republic are unfounded and unjust, and show a complete ignorance of the reality in place. Advocates of the ruling state claim that contrary to international accusations, the sentence has nothing to do with issues of race, but that it rather a matter of national sovereignty. That is, they consider the ruling as part of the country’s legitimate right as a constitutional democracy to finally address the grave immigration problem that has haunted it for decades, and regularize the legal status of all its residents. Moreover, many also point out that the DR has amicably always supported its Haitian neighbor, ofering wide support during its tragic 2010 earthquake and providing services to all Haitian immigrants it hosts within its borders. In response to strong international demands to revoke the ruling, many Dominicans vehemently state that their government cannot be expected to revoke a legitimate sentence of its highest judicial court, as that would violate Dominican Republic’s rule of law and institutional integrity as a democratic country. They highlight the country’s lawful right to handle its own internal affairs and redefine the terms of their nationality as they see fit, without succumbing to international pressures that try to violate its national sovereignty by wanting to overthrow its highest judicial institution. Countering arguments point out that indeed, the DR has the right to redefine its nationality, as it has already done through the 2010 constitutional reform that abolished birthright citizenship, but that it does not have, however, the right to apply the measure retroactively back to 1929.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights agrees with this previous premise in its recent recommendations. Following its official investigation in the Dominican Republic, it concluded in December 2013 that the country should 1) guarantee citizenship to those who already possessed it between 1929 and 2010 and had it revoked; 2) not force affected individuals to register as foreigners in order to recover their citizenship; 3) guarantee that any measures devised to recover citizenship be simple, clear, nondiscriminatory and automatic; 4) make these measures economically accessible.(vii)
In response, the Dominican government has pledged to soon present a legal pathway that will outline how those born to undocumented immigrants on Dominican soil who have undeniable roots and ties to the country can lawfully regain their citizenship. Perhaps this proposal will embody a compromise both sides of the argument can agree on: on the one hand, to allow the Dominican Republic to assert its legitimate sovereignty in deciding the terms of its own nationality and maintain the rule of law and the institutional legitimacy and integrity of its highest judicial court, the Constitutional Tribunal, by respecting (and not revoking) the its 168-13 ruling, while on the other hand, simultaneously still respecting the human and civil rights of all its residents by allowing those who lost their citizenship to lawfully recover it in a permanent and decisive way.
i. Movimiento por un Registro Civil Libro de Discriminacion. “Al menos 1,584 dominicanos/as desnacionalizados.”
ii. Anderson, Jon. “Defning Citizenship in the Dominican Republic | World Policy Institute.” World Policy Journal.
iii. “Dominican Republic Data.” The World Bank.
iv. Davis, Nick. “Te massacre that marked Haiti-Dominican Republic ties.” BBC News.
v. “Jamaica Observer.” Sleeping US Giant Awakens on Dominican Republic.
vi. Charles, Jaqueline. “Caribbean leaders defend Haiti, denounce Dominican decision.” Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
vii. “Preliminary Observations from the IACHR’s Visit to the Dominican Republic.” Organization of American States.
by Andrea Verdeja
The Dominican Republic has recently been at the center of a very tense international human rights controversy, following the denationalization of around 200,000 Dominican citizens of direct or remote Haitian descent. According to the Dominican Republic’s 1929 constitution, which was valid until 2010, Dominican citizenship could be acquired by two means: (1) through Jus Sanguinis, if either or both parents already held Dominican citizenship or (2) through Jus Soli, if the individual was born on Dominican soil; except, those born to parents “in transit.” This clause was originally stipulated to account for children of foreign diplomats that were born in the country, but were living there only temporarily or transitionally.
In 2007, the Dominican government passed Resolution 12-07, which granted state officials the authority to deny access to or indefinitely withhold any legal documents of individuals whose parents could not prove they had regular legal status in the Dominican Republic at the time of their birth.(i) Within this context, all illegal immigrants residing in the Dominican Republic were considered to be “in transit,” and therefore their children, albeit being born on Dominican soil, did not have a right to citizenship according to the 1929 Constitution.
In practical terms, this meant that anyone who was currently a Dominican citizen but whose parents, grandparents or great-grandparents (essentially any ancestor dating back to 1929) could not prove regular legal status would have their national identification documents confiscated and their nationality revoked, as citizenship was “mistakenly” and unlawfully awarded to them in the past. In order to regain a legal status in the country, former-Dominican citizens would have to register as foreigners and re-apply for Dominican naturalization in their countries of origin. Similarly, recently born children of undocumented parents were denied their birth certificates under the same rationale through Resolution 12-07. This changed in 2010, when a Constitutional reform specifically clarified that children of illegal immigrants were not entitled to automatic Dominican citizenship through Jus Solis, effectively abolishing birthright citizenship(ii) as many countries around the world have done recently. In September 2013, after six years of appeals claiming that the denationalization of Dominican citizens through Resolution 12-07 violated the country’s constitution, the highest Dominican judicial court, the Constitutional Tribunal, concluded through Ruling 168-13 that the resolution was constitutionally valid and converted the decree into a law.
The complex and delicate implications of this ruling acquire a very distinct light when taking into account the socio-political, economic and demographic reality of the Dominican Republic and its historical relations to Haiti, with whom it shares the island of Hispaniola. As the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, Haiti’s harsh economic reality and tumultuous political strife have forced thousands of Haitians to cross the border in search of employment opportunities and an overall better quality of life. This caused the Dominican Republic, with a total population of 10 million people, to have nearly one million Haitian immigrants currently living within its borders, many of them illegally. Inevitably, this situation represents a severe problem for the Dominican Republic, where already over 40% of its own population lives under the extreme poverty line and has no access to basic public services.(iii) After Haiti’s devastating 2010 earthquake, the mass illegal influx of Haitian immigrants was only aggravated. For many Dominicans, this reality has stirred deep fears and concerns, pointing out that the country cannot even look after its own population, let alone take care of Haitian immigrants whose presence further exacerbates the problem by draining the country of its already scarce services and resources. The 168-13 ruling, therefore, is not merely a judicial review: it is specifically meant to target Haitian immigrants and the several subsequent generations that have by now been born and raised in the Dominican Republic.
Beyond the economic disparity between both countries and the language, and the resulting mass illegal immigration of Haitians that has sparked a backlash of fearful and defensive nationalist Dominican sentiments, a long history of prevalent Dominican-Haitian ethnic tensions further complicates the scenario. The two countries’ conflict-filled past ranges all the way from military occupation, state-sponsored genocide, and wide-spread human trafficking to institutionalized racial discrimination.
Following their independence from France in 1804, Haiti militarily invaded the Dominican Republic (at the moment still a Spanish colony) and occupied it for a period of 22 years. Dominicans claimed their independence from Haiti in 1844 through an armed insurgency, and ever since relations between both countries have been very unstable. Existing racial and cultural differences have developed through time as a source of great discord between both national groups. While Dominicans are predominantly mulatos (mixture of white colonials and black slaves), Haitians are by contrast overwhelmingly black, as there was no mixture between slaves and colonials – consequently making both national groups easily and racially distinguishable from the other. In addition to race, both groups are further divided through language and religious differences, Dominicans being Spanish-speaking and Catholic while Haitians speak French and Creole and practice voodoo.
Over time, Dominican national and cultural identity evolved to be heavily based on rejecting anything and everything that was related to Haiti, whose symbolic and demographic blackness was equated with backwardness, poverty and historically with military invasion and oppression. During the Trujillo dictatorship era of 1930-1961 in the Dominican Republic, an enormous emphasis was put on becoming a “civilized” and modern country. This meant re-writing Dominican history text-books and reshaping a national collective imagery that would reject Dominicans’ half-black ancestry and instead solely highlight their partially white European heritage. This anti-black Dominican national identity was ultimately embodied in an aggravated form of anti-Haitianism, its most infamous example being Trujillo’s orchestration of 1937 Parsley Massacre (also known as El Corte) of 10,000-25,000 Haitians living in the Dominican border in order to “whiten” and purify the Dominican race.(iv) Facing potential economic and political sanctions from the Organization of American States (OAS) as a consequence of his atrocities, Trujillo further took advantage of the situation by welcoming a great number of white European refugees before and during WWII in order to waive the sanctions and regain international sympathy. Ultimately contributing to his “race whitening” project, large groups of Jewish and Spanish refugees who were respectively feeing from Hitler’s and Franco’s regimes immigrated into the country.
Despite widespread hatred for negritude and in particularly anti-Haitianism being embedded within Dominican national identity, an undeniable reality is that Haitian immigrants have helped sustain the Dominican economy for decades by supplying an abundant source of cheap labor. Primarily working in the sugar cane and banana plantations or in the booming construction industry, Haitian immigrants often work under exploitive and/or inhumane conditions and are in some cases even deported without pay through lucrative human trafficking rings. This has been for a long time at the heart of a large wave of attacks and denouncements made against the Dominican Republic by numerous international organizations and human rights advocates as well as by international media.
It is within this broader context of Dominican/Haitian tensions that the recent TC 168-ruling has effectively left thousands of Dominican citizens of Haitian decent without permission to work, continue their studies, or access any kind of public service including healthcare. Being rendered inexistent within the legal system, the affected population does not have any documentation to stay in the country, nor leave it to go back to Haiti. Moreover, because it is being applied on a retroactive basis as far back as four or five generations, many of the affected Dominicans have no cultural, political, familiar, religious or linguistic ties to their original Haitian roots, having been born and raised as Dominicans their entire lives. This makers the proposed naturalization plan of requiring them to register as foreigners, go back to Haiti without even speaking the language, and re-apply for naturalization quite problematic.
Immediately following the ruling, the Dominican Republic has been met with wide-spread indignation and condemnation from the international community, plunging the country into an international human rights scandal that has resulted in ruptured diplomatic ties and severed geopolitical relations. The ruling has been publicly condemned by the OAS, the EU, the US government, as well as by many UN agencies including the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights, who believe the ruling violates fundamental human rights.(v) In addition, following an initiative spearheaded by the Prime Ministers of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the 15-member Caribbean Community (CARICOM) voted to block the Dominican Republic’s bid for membership to its regional economic grouping, deeming the ruling xenophobic.(vi) The sentence has been further denounced by numerous NGOs and human rights advocates across the world as an act of civil genocide, ethnic cleansing, newly instated apartheid and racist bigotry, further calling for the international boycott of the Dominican tourism industry and its expulsion from international organizations.
Though the Dominican public is deeply divided on the issue, there has been a strong nationalist defense of the ruling. Many feel that the plethora of international accusations against the Dominican Republic are unfounded and unjust, and show a complete ignorance of the reality in place. Advocates of the ruling state claim that contrary to international accusations, the sentence has nothing to do with issues of race, but that it rather a matter of national sovereignty. That is, they consider the ruling as part of the country’s legitimate right as a constitutional democracy to finally address the grave immigration problem that has haunted it for decades, and regularize the legal status of all its residents. Moreover, many also point out that the DR has amicably always supported its Haitian neighbor, ofering wide support during its tragic 2010 earthquake and providing services to all Haitian immigrants it hosts within its borders. In response to strong international demands to revoke the ruling, many Dominicans vehemently state that their government cannot be expected to revoke a legitimate sentence of its highest judicial court, as that would violate Dominican Republic’s rule of law and institutional integrity as a democratic country. They highlight the country’s lawful right to handle its own internal affairs and redefine the terms of their nationality as they see fit, without succumbing to international pressures that try to violate its national sovereignty by wanting to overthrow its highest judicial institution. Countering arguments point out that indeed, the DR has the right to redefine its nationality, as it has already done through the 2010 constitutional reform that abolished birthright citizenship, but that it does not have, however, the right to apply the measure retroactively back to 1929.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights agrees with this previous premise in its recent recommendations. Following its official investigation in the Dominican Republic, it concluded in December 2013 that the country should 1) guarantee citizenship to those who already possessed it between 1929 and 2010 and had it revoked; 2) not force affected individuals to register as foreigners in order to recover their citizenship; 3) guarantee that any measures devised to recover citizenship be simple, clear, nondiscriminatory and automatic; 4) make these measures economically accessible.(vii)
In response, the Dominican government has pledged to soon present a legal pathway that will outline how those born to undocumented immigrants on Dominican soil who have undeniable roots and ties to the country can lawfully regain their citizenship. Perhaps this proposal will embody a compromise both sides of the argument can agree on: on the one hand, to allow the Dominican Republic to assert its legitimate sovereignty in deciding the terms of its own nationality and maintain the rule of law and the institutional legitimacy and integrity of its highest judicial court, the Constitutional Tribunal, by respecting (and not revoking) the its 168-13 ruling, while on the other hand, simultaneously still respecting the human and civil rights of all its residents by allowing those who lost their citizenship to lawfully recover it in a permanent and decisive way.
i. Movimiento por un Registro Civil Libro de Discriminacion. “Al menos 1,584 dominicanos/as desnacionalizados.”
ii. Anderson, Jon. “Defning Citizenship in the Dominican Republic | World Policy Institute.” World Policy Journal.
iii. “Dominican Republic Data.” The World Bank.
iv. Davis, Nick. “Te massacre that marked Haiti-Dominican Republic ties.” BBC News.
v. “Jamaica Observer.” Sleeping US Giant Awakens on Dominican Republic.
vi. Charles, Jaqueline. “Caribbean leaders defend Haiti, denounce Dominican decision.” Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
vii. “Preliminary Observations from the IACHR’s Visit to the Dominican Republic.” Organization of American States.
