114 | Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Dominican Republic
passages such as the Constitutional Court’s statement to the effect that “[f]oreigners
from countries other than Haiti number 100,638, whereas the foreigners of Haitian
origin number 668,145. Complainant Juliana Dequis (or Deguis) Pierre is just one of
those 668,145 persons, so that the problem now before us concerns not just her, but
many other Haitian immigrants and their descendants, who represent 6.87% of the
population living within the national territory.” 266 (Emphasis not in the original).
265. Since the issue at the heart of judgment TC/0168/13 is the acquisition of Dominican
nationality based on the principle of jus soli, the Commission finds that the
population group most affected by the judgment are the 209,912 descendants of
Haitian immigrants. Even so, the Commission notes that this figure does not include
other generations of persons of Haitian descent born on Dominican territory since
1929, whose own parents may also have been born in the Dominican Republic. The
209,912 figure that ENI-2012 came up with does not include the second, third or
later generations of descendants of Haitian immigrants whose births were
registered using a valid Dominican identification document.
266. These figures are confirmed by those published by the UNHCR, which estimated that
at the end of 2014, there were some 210,000 stateless persons in the Dominican
Republic. 267 The figure that the UNHCR gives for statelessness is based on the
numbers reported by the First National Survey of Immigrants in the Dominican
Republic [Primera Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes en la República Dominicana],
which estimated the number of persons living in the country who belong to the first
generation born on Dominican territory to immigrant Haitian parents. At the present
time, no official figures are available for subsequent generations born in the
Dominican Republic. This represents one the chief concerns in the area of human
rights in the Dominican Republic and worldwide. The arbitrary deprivation of
nationality and the stateless condition to which persons were relegated if they could
not lay claim to any nationality other than Dominican, had the effect of violating
many of these individuals’ human rights, mainly those of Haitian descent. It also
created the most significant crisis of statelessness in the history of the American
hemisphere. 268
Table X.
266
267
268
Dominican Republic, Constitutional Court, Judgment TC/0168/13. September 23, 2013, pp. 23-24.
The ENI-2012 was conducted by the National Office of Statistics (hereinafter “ONE”), with technical and
financial assistance from the European Union (hereinafter “EU”) and from the United Nations Population Fund
(hereinafter “UNFPA”). See UNHCR, UNHCR Mid-Year Trends 2014. January 2015.
Globally, countries with higher number of stateless persons than the Dominican Republic for 2014 were
Myanmar with 810,1000, Ivory Coast with 700,000 and Letonia with 262,80. See, See, UNHCR, UNHCR Global
Trends: Forced Displacements 2014. P. 44 et seq. Available at: http://unhcr.org/556725e69.html.
Organization of American States | OAS
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