Chapter 2 The Right to Nationality and Judgment TC/0168/13 of the Constitutional Court | 91 204. The citizens of a State party do not have exclusive claim to the enjoyment and exercise of the rights recognized in the American Convention and in other InterAmerican and international instruments; all persons are entitled to enjoy those rights, irrespective of their nationality or their situation of statelessness. The preambles to the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, the American Convention and the Protocol of San Salvador clearly state that “the essential rights of man are not derived from one's being a national of a certain state, but are based upon attributes of the human personality” and therefore justify international protection in the form of a convention reinforcing or complementing the protection provided by the domestic law of the American states. 209 205. During the time that the Inter-American Commission has been monitoring the situation of the right to nationality of Dominicans of Haitian descent, a number of Dominican officials and political parties have repeatedly argued that matters pertaining to nationality essentially come under the State’s domestic jurisdiction where the Dominican State is sovereign to decide how the question of nationality will be regulated; hence, they contend, international law does not factor it. For its part, in judgment TC/0168/13, the Constitutional Court held that “for almost a century it has been internationally accepted that the conditions for granting nationality are part of a State’s sovereignty and its exclusive competence”; 210 hence, “the attribution of nationality is the ‘domaine réservé’ or exclusive jurisdiction of the State.” 211 206. In response to the position taken by a number of Dominican officials, and by the Constitutional Court in particular, the Inter-American Commission must point out that such a position is anachronistic and out of step with modern international law. At the international level, the right to nationality has been widely recognized as a fundamental human right. While the principal instruments of the Inter-American Human Rights System recognize the right to nationality, the regional legal instruments also widely recognize it as a human right. The international community has recognized that protection of the right to nationality is a matter of immediate importance to international law and that violation of that right compromises the State’s international responsibility. One of the principal manifestations of the foregoing is the fact that the right to nationality is upheld in a number of international 212 and regional 213 instruments. The question of nationality is also 209 210 211 212 See, American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, Preamble; American Convention on Human Rights, Preamble; Protocol of San Salvador, Preamble. Cf. Judgment TC/0168/13. Supra note XX, p. 25. Cf. Judgment TC/0168/13. Supra note XX, p. 29. The right to nationality is recognized in the following international legal instruments, among others: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 15; the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Article 5, whose first paragraph and whose paragraph (iii) (d) provide that the States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminate racial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of everyone, without distinction as to race, color, or national or ethnic origin, to equality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights (…) the right to nationality; the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 24(3); the Convention on the Rights of the Child (articles 7 and 8); the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women ; the Convention on the Nationality of Married Women (Article 9), which establishes similar guarantees of the right to nationality in the case of married Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR