Caribbean & Central America - September 2015 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Despite all the negative attention and resultant diplomatic tensions with its neighbours, the Dominican government led by President Danilo Medina continues to implement its controversial migration policy. The international pressure for the Dominican authorities not to resort to the summary mass deportation of Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born children remains. But not even a visit by the new Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS) to the country (see sidebar) after the OAS’s offer to mediate in the dispute was rebuffed by the Medina government [RC-15-08] has deterred the Dominican authorities.

“The implementation of the migration policies and the deportation of all those irregular immigrants that failed to adhere to the regularisation and naturalisation programme is non-negotiable”. This was the response that the Dominican Republic (DR)’s foreign minister, Andrés Navarro, gave on 20 August to the latest calls made by the Haitian government, the OAS and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) for the DR to stop deporting migrants to Haiti amid fears that this could result in the violation of the rights of a large number of Dominican-born individuals of Haitian descent.

The Haitian government has been clear that while it is prepared to accommodate any Haitian nationals repatriated from the DR, it was not prepared to take in any individuals born in the DR and turned away from the country of their birth. Similarly, the OAS reiterated that the DR authorities had to ensure that no individual is denied their right to a nationality as a result of its new migration policies and no individuals are wrongfully deported to Haiti. These calls came after the Dominican authorities confirmed on 14 August that following the formal closure of their migrant regularisation and naturalisation programme in June, they had began repatriating Haitian migrants back to their country.

The OAS had urged the DR to work with Haiti to develop a repatriation protocol before it began deporting individuals so as to avoid the situation turning into a humanitarian crisis. However, the Haitian authorities have complained that although the two governments have held a number of high-level meetings to come up with a joint protocol to deal with repatriations, the DR had begun this process before such a protocol had been fully established.

The Dominican government maintains that its migration policies do not inherently violate any human rights and that it has adopted all the necessary measures to ensure the rights of all migrants in the country are respected. This was reiterated by Navarro, who insisted that the process of repatriating Haitian migrants was being carried out “without any inconveniences and with strict adherence to human rights”. Navarro said that so far 220 Haitians had been repatriated after their individual cases were reviewed. Citing interior & police ministry (MIP) figures, Navarro said that some 73,606 irregular Haitian migrants had so far decided to voluntarily leave the DR for Haiti, assisted by the Dominican authorities.

Navarro was also adamant that this process had been observed by “various national and international organisations that have verified that the implementation of our migration policy is being done with full respect for human rights as ordered by President Medina”. He added that so far no one has presented “any evidence whatsoever” to show that there was anyone in the DR under threat of becoming ‘stateless’  as Haiti and some in the international community have warned. Indeed Navarro pointed out that 288,000 foreign migrants (the majority of which are Haitian) had successfully registered for the regularisation and naturalisation programme before its closure and that the MIP has already issued new identification cards to 84,000 of these migrants.

But all of this failed to assuage the concerns of the international community. A few days after Navarro’s comments, on 26 August, Caricom Secretary General Irwin LaRocque said that the organisation will ask the United Nations (UN) to monitor the repatriation of migrants from the DR to Haiti to ensure that the rights of all migrants are being respected. LaRocque made the announcement after meeting Haiti’s foreign minister, Lener Renaud. LaRocque said that during the meeting Renaud presented him with the results of a survey carried out by the International Organization for Migration of migrants crossing the DR-Haiti border, which found that 27% of the 6,311 interviewed between 17 June and 13 August said that they had been deported from the DR despite having been born there and some of them (3.8%) had even been issued with Dominican identification documents.

The day after Caricom’s announcement, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issued its own statement in which it reminded the DR of its obligation to protect the fundamental rights of all migrants. In particular the IACHR called on the Dominican government to ensure the protection of the rights of those individuals that had been born in the country and retroactively deprived of their nationality by a contentious court ruling that is suspected of violating international law (see sidebar).

The implementation of the DR’s migration policies will clearly continue to be closely scrutinised by the international community. The Medina administration will remain under pressure to show that its handling of this thorny issue is exemplary. Otherwise the DR will leave itself open to cases of human rights violations being brought against it in international forums.

• Almagro gets cold reception

On 18 August the new OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro made his first official visit to the DR. Almagro’s visit came during the second annual general assembly of the Association of World Election Bodies held in Santo Domingo on 18-19 August. But because Almagro’s remarks about the situation of Haitian migrants in the DR - that “Hispaniola is an island and when you have an island there usually are not two countries, just one”- has been seen as biased and an affront to the DR’s independence by many Dominicans, he received a less than warm welcome. Figures such as Milton Guevara, the president of the DR’s constitutional court, criticised Almagro’s and the OAS’s “lack of impartiality” and once again rejected the OAS’s offer to help resolve the issue.

• IACHR statement

“The Commission reminds the Dominican State that it has the obligation to individually analyse and justify any deportations... as mass deportations are manifestly contrary to international law”, the IACHR statement reads. The IACHR then urges the Dominican government to “adopt all the measures to guarantee the rights that individuals born in the Dominican Republic have to live in Dominican territory and to claim Dominican nationality after they were arbitrarily and retroactively deprived of this by the [September 2013] TC/168/13 ruling by the [DR’s] constitutional court”.