Chapter 2 The Right to Nationality and Judgment TC/0168/13 of the Constitutional Court | 115 Statelessness by country or territory | Late 2014 269 267. The Constitutional Court held that judgment TC/0168/13 had effects ‘inter comunis’ with respect to “a very large group of people living in situations that, from a factual and legal standpoint, are either the same as or similar” to that of Mrs. Deguis Pierre. As a result, this judgment has denationalized individuals and created a problem of statelessness on a scale never before seen in the Americas. To illustrate the size of the population affected by judgment TC/0168/13, it should be noted that of the 3,342 persons who provided information, communications and testimony during the Commission’s five-day on-site visit in the Dominican Republic, 1,843 claimed to have been affected by the judgment. The ripple effect created by the Constitutional Court’s decision to declare that the judgment had effects inter comunis touches all generations of persons born in the Dominican Republic since June 21, 1929 who are descendants of persons of Haitian origin. 268. The Commission is concerned that, having been arbitrarily deprived of their Dominican nationality, being relegated to statelessness and without any real connection to the country of their ancestors, persons born on Dominican territory of Haitian descent have been segregated and marginalized within Dominican society. As a result, they have had to contend with many obstacles or have even been denied access to education, employment, participation in political life and so on. 270 The effects of the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, loss of recognition as a person before the law, and statelessness have been multigenerational in the Dominican Republic, since these conditions have affected the children and grandchildren of the first generation of Haitian descendants born within Dominican territory who, because they did not have identity documents or their identity documents were 269 270 See, UNHCR, UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement 2014, pp. 48 et seq. See, Human Rights Watch, “Illegal People”: Haitians and Dominico-Haitians in the Dominican Republic. New York, 2002. Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR