Human Rights In Transit: Nationality, Anti-Haitianism, and the Reactionary State in the Dominican Republic

The Dominican Republic and Haiti share a long and troubled history in which race, ethnicity, and culture have been the primary factors in each country’s contrasting national narrative and identity. For many decades Haitians living in the Dominican Republic and their descendants have suffered from lack of recognition from the Dominican government, but since the 1990s this ensuing condition of statelessness has become more widespread and has been greatly aggravated by several actions taken by the Dominican State. In the first decade of the 2000s, the State introduced new laws and policies, including the Law 285 on Immigration, the civil policy directive Circular 017, and the sections on nationality and citizenship in the new 2010 constitution which opened up many in the Dominican Republic to exclusion from nationality on the basis of presumed illegal immigration on the part of their ancestors, effectively singling out those perceived to be “Haitian.” Many elements influenced the timing of the passage of these changes, but litigation against the State in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in cases like Yean y Bosico v. La Republica Dominicana and Emildo Bueno Oguis v. La Republica Dominicana inadvertently led the State to assert more strongly its right to determine the parameters of Dominican nationality. The State openly rejected the Court’s rulings against it as threats to national sovereignty and actively continues to exclude Dominico-haitians from legal recognition and the ensuing rights of citizenship