{"id":80863,"date":"2016-10-10T12:00:48","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T11:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=80863"},"modified":"2016-10-07T14:39:03","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T13:39:03","slug":"the-horrors-of-a-hurricane-doubled-by-statelessness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/10\/the-horrors-of-a-hurricane-doubled-by-statelessness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Horrors of a Hurricane, Doubled by Statelessness"},"content":{"rendered":"

People without Dominican, Haitian Citizenship Stranded as Hurricane Matthew Approaches<\/em><\/p>\n

3 Oct 2016 – <\/em>Hurricane \u201cMatthew\u201d is\u00a0set\u00a0to hit Haiti and Jamaica.\u00a0Southern Haiti will\u00a0likely\u00a0be hit hard, including Anse-a-Pitres, one of the poorest and most\u00a0remote areas of the island.<\/p>\n

My thoughts tonight are with Haitians, but also with\u00a0the\u00a0perhaps\u00a0thousands of stateless people\u2014including children\u2014along\u00a0Haiti\u2019s\u00a0border with the Dominican Republic.\u00a0They\u00a0live in make-shift camps constructed from\u00a0sticks, cardboard and clothes tied or sewn together into tent-like structures.\u00a0I can\u2019t imagine many worse places to be when a hurricane dumps 40 inches of rain.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A boy fixes the roof of a makeshift tent at a refugee camp for Haitians returning from the Dominican Republic on the outskirts of Anse-a-Pitres, Haiti, September 6, 2015.
\u00a9 2015 Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

Many\u00a0of them\u00a0were Haitians who migrated to the Dominican Republic\u00a0for work,\u00a0but left\u00a0or were\u00a0forcibly removed from the\u00a0Dominican\u00a0Republic when\u00a0authorities re-started deportations of undocumented people.\u00a0Others were\u00a0born in the\u00a0Dominican Republic and considered Dominican, until\u00a0a 2013 court ruling retroactively removed citizenship from perhaps\u00a0tens of thousands of\u00a0Dominicans of Haitian descent.<\/p>\n

At least\u00a0135,000 people have been\u00a0deported or\u00a0pressured to leave\u00a0the Dominican Republic since last summer.\u00a0They have gone to Haiti, but many\u00a0do not consider themselves Haitian, and they\u00a0may not have any Haitian identification.<\/p>\n

I was in Anse-a-Pitres in early September, talking to women who\u00a0were pregnant or had recently given birth in\u00a0the\u00a0destitute camps.<\/p>\n

Lucille, 29,\u00a0told me about her deportation\u00a0in July 2015. She was\u00a0picked up on the street and\u00a0asked if she had Dominican identification papers. She\u00a0said no,\u00a0and was told\u00a0to get in a truck.\u00a0Immigration officers drove her to the border and told her to\u00a0get out.\u00a0She was separated from her children but eventually they came\u00a0over the border to join her in Anse-a-Pitres\u2019\u00a0Parc Cadeux camp.<\/p>\n

Lucille\u00a0was born in Dominican Republic and was Dominican\u00a0\u2013\u00a0or at least\u00a0until the court\u2019s\u00a0decision came down.\u00a0In 2015, Human Rights Watch\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0on the inadequate efforts by the Dominican government to remediate the situation before the deportations restarted.<\/p>\n

\"haiti-dominica-stateless-border-lac\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Dominican Republic should stop deporting\u00a0those\u00a0who were born\u00a0as citizens\u00a0in their country\u00a0and should put in place workable mechanisms so people like Lucille\u00a0are fully recognized\u00a0as Dominicans. And if the deportations of non-Dominicans continue, they should be done in way that meets international standards, with cases\u00a0assessed\u00a0individually and family unity preserved.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know where Lucille and her children are sheltering today or\u00a0where they will be\u00a0when\u00a0the hurricane hits\u00a0tonight, but I know they shouldn\u2019t be\u00a0forced to be\u00a0there at all.<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Skye Wheeler – <\/em>Researcher, Women’s Rights Division<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 hrw.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 Oct 2016 – My thoughts tonight are with Haitians, but also with the perhaps thousands of stateless people\u2014including children\u2014along Haiti\u2019s border with the Dominican Republic. They live in make-shift camps constructed from sticks, cardboard and clothes tied or sewn together into tent-like structures. I can\u2019t imagine many worse places to be when a hurricane dumps 40 inches of rain. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80863\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}