A NIGHTMARE is about to end for some 24,000 people in the Dominican Republic (DR). For months a court ruling has in effect rendered them stateless, in the process straining the country’s tense relations with Haiti, its poorer neighbour on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. But for many others, the ordeal is continuing.Until a decade ago the children of Haitian migrants who were born in the DR were recognised as Dominican nationals, even if their parents had immigrated illegally. The rules began to change in 2004, and in 2010 a new constitution made a legally resident parent a requirement for citizenship at birth. Then, last September, a ruling of the Constitutional Court denied citizenship to the offspring of illegal immigrants who had arrived before that change.The government maintains that these revisions justly removed an anomaly and conform with practice elsewhere. Yet the children concerned—many well into middle age—were at a stroke reclassified as foreigners, and have since been refused new identity documents. Instead they were told to request new papers from their purported country of origin, even though the vast majority have never been to Haiti, speak only Spanish and cannot prove they are eligible for Haitian citizenship.Relations on Hispaniola have been tense ever since Haiti occupied the DR in 1821-44, but this time the world took notice. Pressure groups and...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1gDVAdx
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