According to an official in the consular section of the Haitian embassy in Ottawa, Canada:
An individual who has previously lost their Haitian citizenship and wishes to reclaim
it must be able to prove their Haitian origin, typically with a Haitian birth certificate
or an official copy of the birth register…If the requestor does not have their birth
certificate, they can ask a proxy in Haiti, such as a family member or a friend, to
request an official copy of the birth register at the National Archives of Haiti. If the
birth was never registered or the records are unavailable, the embassy advises the
individual to hire a lawyer to make a formal request for a legal decision confirming
their identity at a court of first instance in Haiti. The lawyer would look for evidence
that can be used to prove the individual’s Haitian origins, such as witnesses to their
birth or a baptism certificate, to take before the court.356
As noted by the U.S. State Department, Haiti’s “dysfunctional civil registry system and weak
consular capacity throughout the Caribbean made obtaining documentation extremely
difficult for individuals living inside or outside the country” and that “many official documents
were destroyed in the January 2010 earthquake.”357 Moreover, the Haitian government “did not
register all births immediately and did not keep statistics concerning the number of unregistered births each year.”358
It is accordingly likely that a number of individuals who are or will be denaturalized in the
United States will be unable to re-acquire Haitian nationality. A similar situation occurred
following the 2013 Sentencia in the Dominican Republic, following which the prime minister of
Haiti publicly stated that affected Dominicans of Haitian descent were stateless and not
citizens of Haiti under the operation of its nationality laws in effect at the time.359
India
The highest proportion of individuals targeted for denaturalization in the United States are
from India. According to the Constitution of India, “[n]o person shall be a citizen of India…or
be deemed to be a citizen of India…if he has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of any foreign
State.”360 Article 9 of India’s Citizenship Act (1955, amended 2003) regulates termination of
citizenship, and states that “Any citizen of India who by naturalization, registration [or]
otherwise voluntarily acquires, or has at any time between the 26th January, 1950 and the
commencement of this Act, voluntarily acquired the citizenship of another country shall, upon
such acquisition…cease to be a citizen of India.”361
Article 10 details provisions relating to deprivation of citizenship. Accordingly, some citizens,
including those who naturalized, may be deprived of Indian citizenship “by an order of the
Central Government” if it believes that naturalization was obtained by fraud; if the “citizen
has shown himself by act or speech to be disloyal or disaffected towards the Constitution of
II. Denaturalization: A Radical Measure in the Hands of Zealots
83
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents