Statelessness In Our Hemisphere

The Effects of the Recent Dominican Republic Constitutional Court Decision Denaturalizing its Citizens of Haitian Descent

Monday, April 13, 2015

9 am - 5 pm

Church Center for the United Nations

777 United Nations Plaza, 2nd Floor

New York, NY map

Light breakfast and Lunch served

On April 13th, legal scholars, activists, and community leaders from the U.S., Haiti, and the Dominican Republic will gather in New York City to address one of the most essential rights of human rights: the right to a nationality

Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and actress Angelina Jolie recently announced an ambitious global campaign to end the plight of 10 million stateless people around the world - those who are without a country to call home. As the United Nations' refugee agency head Antonio Guterres recently noted: "Statelessness makes people feel like their very existence is a crime."

Ironically, on the very same day, the Dominican Republic reaffirmed its decision to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. This effort did not merely do away with classic birthright citizenship moving forward: This overzealous xenophobic effort stripped birthright citizenship for all those born in the country since the 1920s.

Sadly, this event by our Caribbean neighbor went unnoticed in the United States. Though a country's effort to create a stateless group is universally condemned, rogue countries have sadly used such a tactic to harm its most vulnerable minority groups. Such a status leaves these former citizens without the most basic of rights you and I take for granted. In other words, they exist as the most invisible and deprived people on the planet.

As represented in article 20 of the American Convention on Human Rights and which the Dominican Republic is a signatory. Article 20: Every person has the right to a nationality!