Latin American Research Review 603 law and defuse international opprobrium. The 2014 law certainly allowed some people to regain citizenship, as even Amnesty International acknowledged and the JCE president Rosario Márquez emphasized in a public address—yet with no recognition of the difficulties involved.26 At the same time, its enactment fell far short of providing a solution for most victims of La Sentencia. The process that it established was intentionally burdensome, treated people as undocumented migrants in their own country, and, even if completed, did not guarantee success. The administrative maze it designed was difficult to navigate for many in group A and most in group B. The complexity of the procedures and inconsistency in the reported numbers of affected people rendered it difficult for civil society organizations to even relate clear facts when reporting to the Inter-American human rights system (Wooding 2018, 16). Because the devil lay in the bureaucratic details, it was and remains difficult for international human rights organizations to continue to monitor and contest the matter. Reflections on the Inter-American human rights system International human rights activism, besides being unable to stop a rights-violating country from engaging in administrative obstructionism, faces an additional complication. The Inter-American system observes the widely practiced “doctrine of exhaustion of remedies,” which mandates that claimants must exhaust all lower legal avenues of complaint before their claim can be considered by a higher court (International Justice Resource Center 2018). Only a restricted set of conditions allows petitioners to move to the Inter-American system for adjudication before they exhaust all lower legal avenues. By dragging its feet and obstructing citizenship restoration, the Dominican government can slow down the escalation of domestic appeals to the international level, as in the Expelled Dominicans and Haitians case in 2014. That case was only heard by the IACtHR because, at the time the complaint was filed, Law 169-14 had not yet been implemented and therefore the first exception to the doctrine of exhaustion of remedies applied (“the domestic legislation of the state concerned does not afford due process of law for the protection of the right or rights that have allegedly been violated”). The processes established by Law 169-14 rendered that exception no longer applicable, forcing complaints to remain mired in inadequately resourced domestic legal channels unless claimants can prove that domestic avenues are futile—an effort that can go down a Kafkaesque path when administrative obstructionism is in play. What does this say about the Inter-American system’s capacity to produce outcomes superior to those that would reasonably be produced by domestic institutions? Although the DR’s 2014 “corrective” was issued largely due to international legal advocacy, there is a clear limit to what relevant international legal institutions can do beyond exert pressure (Martínez 2014, 91; Mordecai, interview). Given how administratively burdened the target population is by the 2014 law and what little legal recourse they have, such as the inability to mobilize the acción de amparo, it is not surprising that Inter-American directives and norms could not prevail over the Dominican government more decisively. Even if core hurdles are cleared—a domestic group mobilizes, activates a transnational network, exhausts all domestic remedies, files a petition with the IACHR, has its claim forwarded to the IACtHR for adjudication, and elicits a rebuke of the government from the Inter-American system—a definitive collective resolution to mass statelessness would prove elusive, even in a region thought to be comparatively conducive to safeguarding human rights. As demonstrated, the types of administrative concessions that elude current 26 “Presidente JCE Rosario Márquez dictó la Conferencia Magistral: ‘Apatridia en la República Dominicana,’” Junta Central Electoral, January 21, 2015, https://jce.gob.do/Noticias/rosario-marquez-dicto-conferencia-magistralapatridia-en-republica-dominicana. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press