to direct authorities to review all civil records since 1929 to ensure that they contained no improper entries of other “foreigners” mistakenly registered as Dominicans. In 2016, UNHCR estimated that the decision made 133,770 people stateless. The number of affected people remains contested today and its elusiveness is exacerbated by past practices of selectively denying documentary proof of nationality to certain groups. The Sentencia largely targeted Dominicans of Haitian origin, many of whose parents came to the Dominican Republic for work and settled there. The decision “legalized actions the state ha[d] been carrying out for many years.” As one observer noted: It was obvious to human-rights groups, the United Nations, and pretty much anyone watching that the Dominican government was doing an end run around some of the most important principles of the rule of law—namely, that you can’t change the rules and then go around punishing people for having violated them in the past.127 In May 2014, months after the Sentencia came down, the Dominican Republic passed Law 169-14, which divided the huge population of affected persons into different groups based, with bitter irony, on whether their names appeared in the civil registry. This would lead to a grant of diminished nationality as a concession, but maintained the fiction that these individuals were never Dominican. For unregistered individuals, the law provides for a separate process to apply for a right to remain in the country for a period of two years and the possibility to naturalize. To date, five years on, no unregistered former nationals have naturalized and only an estimated one-third of previously registered nationals—like Juliana Deguis Pierre— have received confirmation and proof of nationality under the 2014 law.128 Thousands of people have been forced to leave on their own or were forcibly deported. Many more remain, in a condition of total exclusion. The legal situation of hundreds of thousands is still uncertain, with no prospect of relief in sight. United Kingdom Between 1973 and 2002, the British government did not once use its deprivation powers afforded under the British Nationality Acts of 1948 and 1981.129 In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United Kingdom enacted a provision in its nationality law giving the Home Secretary the power to deprive nationality where he or she is “satisfied” that the person has done anything seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of the country. This power could also be used if the individual obtained citizenship by naturalization and the Home Secretary is satisfied that it was obtained by fraud or false representation.130 Under these provisions, only dual nationals could be deprived of nationality, in order to ensure against the creation of statelessness.131 I. History and Context 37