PM chairs Special Caricom meeting
The Honourable Kamla Persad-Bissessar SC, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, will chair a special meeting of the Bureau of Caricom Heads of Government on Tuesday, November 26, 2013, at 10.30 am at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann’s, to examine the Dominican Republic Government’s decision to comply with Judgement TCI 168-13 of the Constitutional Court.
Expected for the Bureau meeting are President of Haiti, Michel Martelly, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, and Caricom Secretary-General, Irwin LaRocque.
PS: Media photographers are asked to be in position at 10 am to capture the arrival of the Bureau Heads. A full press conference will be held after the meeting of Bureau Heads.
Ruling of the Dominican Republic Constitutional Court
On 23 September 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic handed down Judgement TC/0168 on Nationality. The ruling, which cannot be appealed, stems from the decision on the matter of Ms. Juliana Dequis Pierre, a Dominican citizen of Haitian descent, who was denied her birth certificate by the Central Electoral Office of the Dominican Republic.
The Court ruled that Ms. Dequis Pierres was not entitled to Dominican citizenship having been born in the Dominican Republic on April 1, 1984, to Haitian parents, on the grounds that she had been wrongly registered as Dominican at her birth. The Court found that she did not meet the requirements to be registered as a Dominican.
The ruling further stated that its interpretation must be applied retroactively, stripping her of Dominican nationality. The Court also instructed the Dominican authorities to conduct an audit of birth records from June 21, 1929, to the present, in order to identify similar cases and strip those persons of Dominican nationality.