Chapter 1 Introduction | 41 68. 69. 70. 52 53 54 55 56 57 by the Dominican State to appropriately respond to the various problems and challenges that it is tackling in this field.”52 The State also reiterated its commitment to promoting and protecting the human rights “of foreign persons who live in the Dominican Republic under the provisions of the Constitution and laws. In that framework, the National Human Rights Plan has been drafted, a process that is now in its final stage and which was conducted in a participatory, open, and transparent fashion, and in which 700 civil society organizations and government institutions participated.” 53 The State also reiterated “its commitment to the full implementation of the National Plan to Regularize Foreigners so that those more than 20,000 beneficiary persons can live and work in the national territory in peace and security with all the benefits granted to them by law.” 54 It also contended that it has pledged “to continue and expand its policies of inclusion and participation so that increasingly more persons can be lifted out of poverty and benefit from the material and cultural goods of society. The National Plan to Regularize Foreigners is an example of those policies, but the same can be said for what is being done by the Dominican Government in education, health, housing, infrastructure, social security, among other aspects.” 55 The State also informed the Inter-American Commission that “it does not and will not carry out mass expulsions, but that it will continue its policy of repatriating foreigners with an irregular status on the basis of individualized proceedings and on the basis of a treatment that protects the rights and dignity of persons. It also reiterates that it does not and will not carry out repatriations of Dominican nationals as the Dominican State has been wrongly charged of doing.” 56 At the same time, the Dominican State indicated that what is not always taken into account is that the Dominican Republic has the peculiar condition of sharing an island with the Hemisphere’s poorest country and one of the world’s poorest countries as well, which has unfortunately been affected by chronic political and institutional instability and environmental devastation that severely undermine the lives of its inhabitants, all of which entails extraordinary challenges for the Dominican Republic, which are almost never acknowledged or appreciated by relevant sectors of the international community. And despite sensationalist and biased reports that are continuously being published in certain international media by certain international organizations, what is positively noteworthy is the low level of conflict between Dominicans and Haitian migrants or persons of Haitian descent, who live together peacefully and share space without the everyday tensions that are evident in other countries hit by massive floods of migrants.”57 To which it added Ibid., p. 4. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid. pp. 17-18. Dominican Republic, Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the Organization of American States. Note MP-RD-OEA 1395-15: Note whereby the note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the Observations of the Dominican State on the “Draft Report of the Situation of Human Rights in the Dominican Republic is forwarded.” December 21, 2015, pp. 15-16. Ibid., p. 17. Dominican Republic, Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the Organization of American States. Note MP-RD-OEA 1395-15: Note whereby the note from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights | IACHR