598 Wendy Hunter and Francesca Reece thought that children born in the DR of undocumented Haitian parents should not be considered Dominican (Hoy digital 2014). The country came under further fire in 2014, when the IACtHR heard a case against the 2013 ruling. In Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v. the Dominican Republic, the court found the 2013 decision to be in violation of international law, including the American Convention on Human Rights (Inter-American Court of Human Rights 2014). This ruling confirmed the UNHCR’s view that backdating the “in transit” clause made those affected technically stateless and therefore violated international law. The IACtHR ordered that the DR honor its legal obligation to grant nationality to all born within its territory,15 including the children of Haitian migrants targeted by the 2013 ruling. The Dominican government reacted by withdrawing itself from the IACtHR’s jurisdiction, a move that flew in the face of what would be deemed appropriate conduct by international society and was, in fact, illegal under the terms of the Inter-American agreement. Concerned about possible tourism boycotts and jeopardizing the country’s reliance on Petrocaribe for inexpensive oil, Dominican president Danilo Medina responded to the backlash by offering a possible pathway back to citizenship. His awareness of nationalist parties in Congress, which would need to approve the measure, and anti-Haitian attitudes within the JCE, which would implement it, constrained the proposal he ushered through (Díaz 2014; Jorge Prats 2018). Exemplifying administrative obstructionism, the plan set forth by Law 169-14 maneuvered the statelessness issue into a gray zone of compliance/noncompliance with international directives. As encapsulated by one author: “The details were confusing, but that was the point” (Katz 2018). Law 169-14, commonly known as the Naturalization Law (República Dominicana 2014), divided the newly denationalized population into two groups—A and B—depending on previous documentary status. Group A consisted of those born in the Dominican Republic to “in transit” parents between 1929 and 2007, whose births had been recorded in the civil registry yet were now deemed “irregular” due to the “migrant status” of their parents. Group B, treated below, consisted of Dominican-born individuals (mostly of Haitian parentage) whose births were never registered, making them “undocumented migrants” under the new law. An audit of the civil registry going back to 1929 put some 55,000 to 61,000 people into group A.16 The stated intention was to “regularize” and restore their Dominican birth documents, putting them on a pathway back to citizenship. The government charged the JCE with annulling group A’s original civil registrations, retranscribing those records, and reissuing documents to those it approved. Only about half of those in group A ended up receiving the documentation that restored their Dominican citizenship.17 Notably, even people in group A (generally of higher socioeconomic status than in group B) found the process frustrating. Their experiences exemplify administrative obstructionism. Reflecting learning costs, there was a glaring lack of information made available about how to proceed: many applicants found it nearly impossible to determine whether their existing documents were valid and how to proceed if they weren’t. Later in the process, many could 15 Its legal obligation covered those born up to 2010, when the constitution changed the birthright citizenship provision. 16 The official Dominican estimate of group A is 55,000. The Congressional Research Service puts this number closer to 60,000 (Seelke and Margesson 2016), an estimate mirrored by the US Department of State (2017), CEJIL (2017), Amnesty International (2019), and IACHR (2019). In information requested by the authors, the UNHCR estimates group A as 61,049 people. 17 Amnesty International (2015, 27) reports that of the 60,089 registration certificates audited, 27,510 were authorized. The US Department of State (2017, 14), CEJIL (2018, 40), and Amnesty International (2019, 7) estimate that only about 20,000 from group A restored their citizenship. In information requested by the authors in June 2020, the DR’s embassy in Washington, DC, lists the numbers as 24,890 approved, 27,735 transcribed but not approved, and 3,599 pending cases. The UNHCR contends that at least 35,000 persons in group A have not reacquired Dominican nationality. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.48 Published online by Cambridge University Press