Amnesty Int'l joins in condemnation of Dom Rep

LONDON, Oct. 20, CMC – The London-based human rights watchdog, Amnesty International, has joined a chorus of condemnation and calls for the Dominican Republic to retract a Constitutional Court ruling that primarily strips Dominicans of Haitian descent of citizenship.



Amnesty International on Friday urged the Dominican Republic not to implement the court ruling “that could leave hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of foreign descent stateless.”



Under aspects of the ruling, individuals of foreign descent - the vast majority of Dominicans of Haitian origin- could be deprived of their nationality, forced to leave and ordered to apply for citizenship from scratch, Amnesty International said.



“The full implementation of this ruling will have a devastating impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people whose identity documents would be cancelled and, therefore, would see many of their human rights – freedom of movement, education, work and access to healthcare – totally denied,” said Chiara Liguori, Amnesty International researcher on the Caribbean.



Last month ,the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court ruled that Juliana Deguis, who was born in the Dominican Republic in 1984 to Haitian parents, had been wrongly registered as Dominican at her birth.