Executive Summary | 11 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. 2. 3. 4. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has monitored the difficulties and obstacles that children of Haitian immigrants born since the early 1990s are encountering in Dominican territory in order to be registered and benefit from the papers that prove they are Dominican nationals, pursuant to application of the jus soli principle. At first, civil servants of the Civil Registry Offices would refuse to register the birth of children born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian migrants because their parents’ migratory situation was irregular. The argument commonly used by the authorities was that, according to the Constitution, the children of foreigners in transit could not acquire Dominican nationality on the basis of the jus soli principle. The national origin and migratory status of their parents have led Dominicans of Haitian descent to encounter various forms of discrimination throughout their lives, discrimination that has not only violated their rights to nationality, juridical personality, and equality and non-discrimination, but has also precipitated the violations of their other human rights. On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court handed down judgment TC/0168/13. Said ruling redefined, retroactively, the criteria for acquiring citizenship by application of the principle of jus soli by giving a new interpretation to the concept of foreigners in transit, equating this concept with that of a foreigner in an irregular migratory situation. Through this judgment, the Court retroactively changed the interpretation given to the term "foreigners in transit" in the Dominican constitutions in force between 1929-2010, all of which established said category as a constraint to acquire Dominican nationality by jus soli. Indeed, with regard to a particular case, the Court found that despite the fact that the appealing person was born in the Dominican Republic and had been registered by the authorities as such, at a time that the Constitution recognized the ius soli as a means acquiring nationality, the new interpretation of "foreigners in transit" deprived her of the right to Dominican nationality. Judgment TC/0168/13 ordered the administrative transfer of all birth certificates of people born in the Dominican Republic as children of "foreigners in transit" from 1929-2007, to the birth registration book of foreigners, arbitrarily depriving of their nationality a significant number of people who enjoyed Dominican nationality, and leaving them in a situation of statelessness for considering them foreigners despite being born in Dominican territory and having identity documents that proved so. The Commission considers that judgment TC/0168/13 by the Constitutional Court led to the arbitrary deprivation of nationality to all persons over whom it extended its effects on. At the same time, the ruling had a discriminatory effect, since it struck Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR