Chapter 2 The Right to Nationality and Judgment TC/0168/13 of the Constitutional Court | 109 their own migratory situation, while in 27 cases they blamed the fact that they had a foreign surname. Still others attributed their situation to different problems. The Commission is deeply troubled by the fact that 1,843 of those who visited the Commission to provide information said that they had been adversely affected by Constitutional Court judgment TC/0168/13. 255. The information the Commission has compiled over the course of the years, 258 confirmed by the information and testimony received during the 2013 visit, has exposed widespread practices in which Civil Registry officials either suspended further issuance or took back birth certificates or identity cards belonging to Dominicans of Haitian descent. There was no clearly defined procedure involved and the minimum guarantees of due process were not observed. Having examined this information, the Commission notes that the officials at the Civil Registry offices have refused to hand over the documents in question to persons whose surname or physical appearance made the officials suspect that they were the children of Haitian parents, even though there were no irregularities at the time their birth was declared. The children of Haitian parents encounter the same problem: when the identity cards their parents used to register them were checked, their registrations were not found. 256. Much of the testimony given before the Commission recounted how the denial or withholding of documents by officials at the Registry offices and the investigations conducted by the Central Electoral Board to determine the validity of the documents, were motivated by discriminatory considerations such as physical appearance, speech, skin color, language, surnames or the parents’ origin. I’m 24 years old, from Bayaguana, a small province in the eastern part of the country. My mother came to this country in 1986, when she was very young. She had 7 children, and I’m one of them. I’ve lived a normal life like any Dominican, I went to school until I was 18. That was when my hardship began. I went to apply for my identity card, and handed over my birth certificate. They took my application, put my name in the usual book, like any other Dominican, and told me to return in three months, which is the rule here, to get the identity card. But what happened? When I went back three months later, they began making excuses: that they 258 During the IACHR’s visit to the Dominican Republic in 1991, it received testimony from many Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitians who told of how they had been summarily expelled. In many of these summary deportations, families were broken up and property lost. Ten persons who testified stated that although they had been born in the Dominican Republic and had the identification papers to prove it, they were detained by immigration agents or military personnel, their documents were taken away or destroyed and they were subsequently summarily expelled to Haiti, a country they had never been in and where they had no ties or connections of any kind. Testimonies were taken from another 11 persons, whose immediate deportation had the effect of separating them from their children and spouses. Generally speaking, the testimony revealed that the families and children are those most affected by the summary expulsions of Dominican women of Haitian descent and Haitian women; as a result of these forced separations, parents were involuntarily separated from their children and the nuclear family was broken up. See, Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1991. Supra note XX, pp. 286-289. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR