Dominican court ruling strips citizenship from thousands of offspring of Haitian migrants
SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic – The Dominican Republic’s top court has stripped citizenship from thousands of people born to illegal migrants, a category that overwhelmingly includes Haitians brought to work in the nation’s farms.
The constitutional Court ruling published Thursday says officials are studying birth certificates of more than 16,000 people and it notes that electoral authorities have refused to issue identity documents to 40,000 people of Haitian descent. The ruling affects people born since 1929.
The decision gives the electoral commission a year to produce a list of those to be excluded.
It’s a blow to activists who have tried to block what they call “denationalization.”
The Economy Ministry recently calculated that some 500,000 Haitian immigrants live in the Dominican Republic, though there were no estimates of the numbers of Dominicans of Haitian descent.
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