Apartheid just a few hours from home? We won't allow it!

(Version française) On September 23rd, 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic took the deplorable and outrageous decision 168.13 which strip hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of foreign descent of their Dominican nationality . This decision is all the more unacceptable considering it was applied retroactively to all those born on Dominican soil after 1929 from parents referred to as being “in transit”.

According to the country's National Bureau of Statistics, 86 % of the victims of this unjust decision are of Haitian origin. Many of these people have lived in the Dominican Republic for four generations. The Dominican nationality is their only nationality. Their language is Spanish and they have long lost any anchorage they might have had in Haiti. Today, Dominicans of Haitian descent, the oldest of them being 84 and having contributed a lifetime of work for the development of the Dominican Republic find themselves stateless.

While the Dominican authorities argue that this decision will allow those affected to leave the country in order to regularize their status , we received heartbreaking testimony to the contrary . A young woman reported that due to this decision that deprived her of valid identity papers accepted by the Dominican State, she was denied by that same Dominican State the right to travel . As a result, she was unable to reach her American fiance with whom she was to marry in Florida. A spokesperson for the Dominican Consulate in Montreal, told us that a young and talented Haitian-Dominican baseball player who was recruited to play in an American league was also unable to travel outside the country.

It thus appears that the motivation of the Dominican authorities is not to regularize the status of Dominicans of Haitian descent but rather, to create a system of apartheid for a whole class of individuals deprived of legal identity and stripped of all rights. This would make them disposable non-entities and would allow the Dominican State to keep them in a state of perpetual servitude, to subject them to the worst abuses or to carry out ethnic cleansing of the Dominican population. This tends to remind us that in 1937 , the Dominican dictator Trujillo had slaughtered more than 30,000 people suspected to be of Haitian origin.

Canadian citizens of Haitian or Dominican origin who are just three hours away by plane from this human tragedy , can not allow a repeat of such a genocide in the twenty-first century. Through this letter, it is the voice of Canadian citizens from across the country and the voice of people of all origins across the world that are joined to denounce the infamous decision of the Dominican Constitutional Court.

Although the Dominican Republic has the sovereign right to decide the conditions for granting Dominican nationality , it is bound to international human rights law which states that you can not arbitrarily withdraw a person' nationality, especially if such a measure renders that person stateless. In addition to infringing international law, the decision of the Dominican Constitutional Court breaks from a decision of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and is even contrary to the Dominican Constitution that upholds the principle of non-retroactivity of the law. For all these reasons, we ask you Mr. Minister Baird and Ambassador Urena to send a formal request to the Dominican authorities urging them to invalidate decision 168.13.

We conclude this letter by launching an appeal for human rights and solidarity between peoples because no one is free when others are oppressed.