Dominican Republic: Of Baseball Players and Migration Laws

The New York Times recently highlighted the story of a young Dominican baseball player, Ángel Luis Joseph, who had been offered a contract by the San Francisco Giants. Sadly he lost this contract because the Dominican civil registry office refused to give him an official copy of his birth certificate, without which he could not get a passport or US visa. The Dominican civil registry office said that his documents are “under investigation” because his parents are Haitian. Ángel Luis was born in the Dominican Republic and was issued a Dominican birth certificate by a Dominican registry office. He has grown up speaking Spanish, has attended Dominican schools, and has never been to Haiti.

When I visited the Dominican Republic earlier this month I met with Ángel Luis and 24 other people in his situation (and heard of hundreds more cases). All of these people are unable to obtain official copies of their documents because of “investigations” arising from them having Haitian-sounding surnames. These people could not graduate from school, enter university, obtain a passport, get married, or register the births of their children.

The New York Times article was picked up by a Dominican newspaper – Diario Libre, and it has generated significant interest. Diario Libre’s website now has 10 pages of comments on the article that have been posted by members of the Dominican public. Aware that this is a neuralgic issue in the Dominican Republic, I was not surprised to see some knee-jerk reactions that are disturbingly anti-Haitian. But I was struck by how many Dominicans had written in expressing concern for this young man and hoping for a resolution of this issue for him and for others in his situation.

Many people also pointed to the fact that Dominican migrants overseas are often treated badly, and argued that the Dominican Republic was simply enforcing its migration laws as other countries do. Although it is correct that every country has the right to enforce its own migration laws, these people were misinformed about the Dominican Republic’s own laws. Until 2004, children of non-legal residents were given citizenship under Dominican law. However, a new “Migration Law” was passed in 2004 that re-interpreted the Dominican Constitution as granting citizenship to people born on Dominican soil only if their parents are legal residents. The country is applying this law retroactively to people born before this law came into force -- a violation of international and Dominican law. Some people pointed out that my own country, the UK, has changed its nationality laws to require that at least one parent of a child born in the UK is legally resident for the child to acquire British nationality. This is true, but the UK does not apply this new law to people born before the law changed.

Ángel Luis has now been offered a contract by the Cleveland Indians. But if he cannot get a passport he will lose this contract, too. Let’s hope that the Dominican government gives him an official copy of his birth certificate this time.

--Melanie Teff

Bihari: From Statelessness to Citizenship

This week the Bangladesh High Court ruled that Biharis born in the country after 1971 can be granted Bangladeshi citizenship. Refugees International welcomes this positive decision which, pending final signature, will grant Biharis, or Urdu-speaking people born after the time of independence in Bangladesh, the right to be registered as voters and to receive national identity cards. This measure will allow about half of the 200-500,000 stateless Biharis, hosted by Bangladesh for 36 years, to find a remedy to their lack of an effective nationality. The decision does not cover individuals who were adults at the time of independence.

RI has long advocated for action by the governments of Bangladesh and Pakistan to end this serious human rights abuse by granting citizenship and/or permitting repatriation. RI's last mission to Bangladesh was in February 2006, when staff met with government officials and Bihari leaders to urge timely action. After the visit, U.S. Representative Diane Watson issued a letter to Assistant Secretary Ellen Sauerbrey, who was then the head of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, to press for resolution. RI president Kenneth Bacon and others requested the interim government to consider this group for inclusion in voter rolls and citizenship. On September 5, 2007, the interim government issued a decision in that regard.

In pre-independence India, the Biharis were an Urdu-speaking Muslim minority who resided in the Hindu region of Bihar. At the time of partition in 1947, some of them chose to move to East Pakistan and others to West Pakistan. When civil war broke out in 1970, the Biharis sided with West Pakistan. After the war and the independence of Bangladesh, they were unwelcome in either country. Pakistan feared that a mass influx of Biharis would destabilize an already fragile and culturally mixed population, particularly in the Sindh, where most Bihari wished to migrate. Bangladesh scorned them for supporting the enemy. With neither country offering citizenship, the Biharis (also commonly called "Bangladeshi Biharis", "stranded Pakistanis", "a linguistic minority," "Urdu-speaking stranded Pakistanis," and even just "displaced persons") have been citizens of nowhere for over three decades.

Biharis exist at the fringes of society, with their most fundamental human rights denied. They live in camp-like settlements throughout the country. Living conditions are miserable primarily due to high population density, aging accommodations, poor sanitation and hygiene, lack of education and health care facilities, and limited access to livelihoods, with most employable individuals consigned to day labor, barbering, or rickshaw pulling.

In 2003, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh granted citizenship to ten Biharis. It was a small but significant move. The September decision was the next key step to implementing that judgment. Last Sunday's announcement is another leap forward towards resolving the status of the Bihari community in Bangladesh, but only if it is signed and implemented.

We encourage the Bangladesh High Court to move as expediently as possible to finalize the process so that individuals truly benefit from the decision and also urge rapid development of a strategy to help integrate the young Biharis as citizens. RI hopes that Bangladesh will honor the choice of individuals whether or not to register to vote, and that Pakistan will offer the possibility of resettlement and citizenship for Biharis who wish to live in Pakistan, particularly those seeking family reunification.

-Maureen Lynch

Eritrea-Ethiopia: Shimelba Refugee Camp’s Intellectual Capital

“I recently developed a mathematical theorem and sent my paper to Addis Ababa University. Professors of the Mathematics Department confirmed that it was something new and that they would like to publish it in their academic journal. But I would like to wait on that because I believe certain parts need to be fleshed out more first.” In a frenzied day of interviewing refugees on a recent mission to Ethiopia, comments like these stood out. My colleague and I had about twenty minutes to speak with each person, and instead of detailing problems with food rations, inadequate sheeting for shelter, or the need for more sanitation facilities (problems which were repeatedly mentioned), several of the refugees emphasized their scholarly pursuits. This budding mathematician had obtained an advanced degree before he fled Eritrea a couple of years ago.

Other individuals spoke about their interests. One 22-year-old woman who escaped religious persecution in Eritrea described how she was now working in a laboratory in the camp, learning about avian influenza. Another young man told us that he had always wanted to study astrophysics. He recalled how several years ago at a science fair in Asmara, a foreign dignitary declared him the “best in Africa.” Refugees who slip across the border to Ethiopia rarely bring any belongings or documentation with them, but this person proudly showed us photos taken at that science fair.

Shimelba refugee camp in the northern Tigray region of Ethiopia hosts up to 18,000 residents originally from Eritrea. Up to 500 new refugees come to the camp each month. The vast majority of the refugees are young and university-educated, and many have doctorates. Over 75 percent of the population is male. These refugees largely left Eritrea in order to avoid compulsory military service for both men and women. Thirty years of struggle for independence, a brutal 1998-2000 border conflict with Ethiopia that killed at least 70,000 people and increasing international isolation feed the country’s inclination to prepare – at any cost –to defend itself or deter potential enemies.

But in its dogged pursuit of military readiness, Eritrea is losing its greatest asset: its educated youth. These refugees spoke of burning desires to further their educations, build careers, and live in a city again. According to an official of the Ethiopian refugee ministry, “They are looking for scholarships, sponsorship in urban areas, correspondence courses. And they are getting frustrated.” The Ethiopian government permits the lucky few who can afford to support themselves to live and study in Addis Ababa or other towns. But for many of those who remain in the camp, the stress of idleness and wasted potential has led to mental illness, particularly depression. Many would prefer to return to Eritrea if government policy improves, but pessimistic about the prospects for change, they are eager for resettlement.

If the intellectual capital simmering in Shimelba were allowed to thrive elsewhere, it would be that country’s great gain and Eritrea’s tragic loss.

--Katherine Southwick

Dominican Republic: Will All Dominicans Be Able To Vote on May 16?

Imagine living in a country all your life and believing you are a citizen of that country. Then, when going to renew some documents, you are informed that your birth certificate and identity document were given to you by mistake and all your documents are invalid since they are “under investigation”. That is what is happening now to many people in the Dominican Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian origin live in the Dominican Republic. For decades Haitians have entered neighboring Dominican Republic, seeking an escape from extreme poverty and political violence. They have worked hard in jobs, for very low wages in sectors like sugar-cane cutting and construction. Yet, the way in which Haitians and people of Haitian origin are treated in the Dominican Republic is very disturbing. UN experts on racism and minorities recently reported “a profound and entrenched problem of racism and discrimination in Dominican society.”

A key example is the question of Dominican citizenship for people of Haitian origin. The constitution of the Dominican Republic says that every child born in their territory is Dominican, except for children of diplomats and children of people “in transit”. The Dominican government argues that all people who do not have documents regularizing their stay in the country are “in transit.” They have created a legal absurdity whereby people who have lived most of their lives in the country and even their children and grandchildren, who have never lived in any other country, are classified as being “in transit.” This has not been applied across the board to all foreigners illegally in the country, but has targeted the Dominico-Haitian community. When I lived in the Dominican Republic two of my friends – one Spanish and one Haitian - gave birth to babies. Neither of them had documents permitting their long-term stay in the country. My Spanish friend had no problem registering her baby and getting a birth certificate, while my Haitian friend was refused permission to register her baby.

In March 2007 the Dominican government issued a circular requiring all registry offices to forward any “suspect” documents for investigation, citing concerns that some offices had improperly issued birth certificates to children of foreign parents who did not prove their residence or legal status in the Dominican Republic. Over the past year many people of Haitian origin have gone to their local registry office to renew their identity document or request a copy of their birth certificate, only to be told that their documents have been cancelled as they are “under investigation.” They cannot challenge this cancellation and have no right of appeal. Dominican newspapers have reported that more than 30,000 identity documents have since been cancelled, many belonging to Dominicans of Haitian descent. Some of these cancellations may have been of fraudulently obtained documents, but how can we know when there is no due process to examine individuals’ cases?

On May 16 the Dominican Republic goes to the polls to elect its President. What will happen when people of Haitian origin present their identity cards which double as voting cards, at their voting stations? Will they be told that their documents are not valid? Will their names be on the electoral roll at all? And how many Dominicans of Haitian origin will stay away from the polls, fearing that their documents might be taken away from them if they go to vote? The Dominican Republic relies on its positive image as a democratic country and as a major tourist destination. It should not tarnish that image by disenfranchising a group of its citizens.

-Melanie Teff

President's Corner: Praise and Challenges on Ending Statelessness

Today I had the pleasure of listening to Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, praise Refugees International’s work to make statelessness a major human rights issue for both the UN and the U.S. State Department.

Speaking in New York on a panel on statelessness organized by the U.S. State Department, Mr. Guterres said: “Refugees International is playing a major role in raising awareness, in advocacy and in forcing us to do what we need to do, what we are supposed to do. So, it is a welcome pressure that I hope will go on, especially in drawing my attention to the need to be more effective in this area. As a matter of fact, UNHCR in the beginning was probably a little bit reluctant to give enough importance to statelessness.”

After thanking Mr. Guterres for these comments, I began to think about what it takes to make an advocacy campaign to expand human rights succeed.

Statelessness is a major human rights abuse. There are currently between 11 and 15 million people who aren’t citizens of any country. These non-citizens often can’t vote, send their children to school, own property or work. Yet in 2004, when my colleague, Maureen Lynch, started highlighting the fact that millions of people live without citizenship in any country, few people recognized that statelessness was a problem. And fewer still thought there could be quick solutions to statelessness.

In early 2005, Refugees International issued Maureen’s report, Lives on Hold, which remains one of the most comprehensive surveys ever issued on statelessness. The report described the difficulties stateless people face and provided country-by-country detail on stateless populations. She called stateless people international orphans without rights or protections.

Today, the UN, the U.S. State Department and a number of human rights organizations are working to end statelessness, and efforts are beginning to pay off. Nepal recently granted citizenship to 2.6 million people, and both Bangladesh and the United Arab Emirates have announced plans to grant citizenship to many stateless people within their borders.

Starting next year, the U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report will have a section of statelessness, and the UN system is working more aggressively to monitor and end statelessness.

Much of the credit for this progress goes to Maureen Lynch, whose persistent quest for justice has made statelessness a front-line human rights issue. Working with our colleague, Dawn Calabia, and a succession of dedicated interns, she took her 2005 findings to the UN, to the State Department, to Congress and to other human rights organizations, looking for allies wherever she could find them.

In almost every case she found an open door. People were willing to listen and, sometimes, to take action.

There are several elements to success that we didn’t appreciate when we started this campaign. First, statelessness is a human rights abuse that is easy to understand; the injustice of not being able to vote, to travel, to send children to school or to receive the protection of a state is clear. Second, it doesn’t cost a lot to address and solve the problem; convincing a country to change its laws or to register newborn babies as citizens is a lot cheaper than setting up refugee camps, for example. Third, the improvement in lives and the enhancement of rights can be dramatic when stateless people receive citizenship.

Despite dramatic progress over the last three years, much more needs to be done. There are still major stateless populations in the Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Syria, Thailand and among Palestinian communities in the Middle East that need protection. The campaign for citizenship rights is far from over.

--Ken Bacon

Street Children in Malaysia

Al Jazeera English recently did a piece on street children in Sabah, Malaysia. You can view the clip here. I visited Sabah in April while on mission in Malaysia to look at the humanitarian situation for Burmese refugees. Sabah is a beautiful part of Malaysia that attracts many visitors who are interested in eco-tourism. But it is also home to thousands of migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia whose children often do not have access to public services like health care and education.

Children of migrants in Sabah whose parents have been deported by immigration authorities, and who do not have any other guardians to care for them, often end up living on the street and are forced to find work at a young age. While in Sabah, I visited a fish market in Kota Kinabalu in the early morning and saw many children pushing heavy wooden carts for customers or sleeping on top of crates between the fish stands. According to local community workers I spoke with, these children are also targets for arrest and detention by immigration and police. The street children in Sabah are very vulnerable, particularly those who are without identity documents and may be at risk of being stateless.

If you would like to see more images of the conditions that the street children in Sabah live and work in, I highly recommend the photos of Greg Constantine, who has done some amazing work on Sabah, as well as on stateless populations throughout Asia. And for more information on street children in Malaysia in general, check out this blog on street children around the world.

What it means to be Stateless

Last Thursday Congress held a special briefing on stateless children, organized in part by our Senior Advocate for Statelessness Initiatives Maureen. The briefing brought together various testimonies highlighting the plight of the stateless, meaning persons who have no legal proof of citizenship and with no country that will grant them this right.

Without any documentation of citizenship, stateless people are often prevented from working, owning land, going to school, voting, and even getting married. With the estimated number of stateless people in the world exceeding 11 million, and forty percent of all births going unregistered each year, stateless children are a particularly vulnerable group.

Maureen and RI are at the forefront of the work on this important issue, particularly with our 2005 report on stateless people entitled Lives on Hold: The Human Cost of Statelessness.

This past fall, Maureen conducted two humanitarian missions that focused on statelessness. The first mission to West Africa, with RI consultant Dawn found that stateless issues are at the root of the ongoing conflict in Cote d'Ivoire. You can read the personal story of a stateless woman in western Cote d'Ivoire by clicking here. And in Senegal, RI found that stateless Mauritanians are in need of protection and assistance to return home voluntarily.

The second mission looked at stateless Haitians. Maureen and Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services (LIRS) representative Bernadette found that there are up to one million people of Haitian origin living undocumented in the Dominican Republic. Of these, the group of most concern is the large number of children of Dominican-Haitian descent who are denied the right to citizenship by the government of the Dominican Republic and are not issued identity documents like a birth certificate. This creates a hindrance for these children as they get older and try to register for school.

The problem of statelessness is not going away anytime soon, and it continues to be closely linked with displacement and insecurity around the world. As a result, countries like the US will have to become more involved in assisting stateless persons and in pressuring other governments to stop neglecting these vulnerable populations.

(For more information on RI and statelessness you can read this previous blog entry by our president Ken Bacon).

President's Corner: Combating Statelessness

Over the weekend I got a call from a friend whose son-in-law, an Israeli, had just been detained and charged with violating U.S. immigration laws. He had gone to renew his driver’s license in Texas and a routine search of computer records found that he had failed to renew his Green Card some 20 years ago and had been living here illegally. During that time, he raised a family, started a business and paid taxes. Also, during that time his Israeli passport expired, so he has no official documentation as a citizen of any country and no rights. For the time being, this man illustrates the plight of stateless people—he has no legal protections.

Refugees International estimates that there are more than 11 million stateless people in the world today. “Everyone has the right to nationality,” the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares, but a stateless person lacks the basic rights and privileges that citizenship confers—the right to work, access to school and healthcare, basic legal protections, and, in some countries, the right to vote. What’s more, stateless people frequently fall between the cracks of international relief efforts, as well as national development plans. In many places, they are invisible people.

Who are the stateless? Some people become officially stateless because they fail to keep up with immigration laws. This is the case of the man in Texas. If he is deported, he will reactivate his Israeli citizenship and no longer be stateless. Others belong to groups that fled their countries to escape war or persecution, have been targets of ethnic discrimination, were caught in the wrong place by history, or may be a child born to refugee parents, to migrant workers, or be of mixed parentage in countries whose laws or politics prevent their acquisition of a nationality and an identity. These groups include denationalized Kurds in Syria, Biharis in Bangladesh, Haitians in the Dominican Republic, Nubians in Kenya, Russians in Estonia, and some Palestinians.

The world paid scant attention to stateless people until two years ago, when Refugees International published a report, Lives on Hold: The Human Costs of Statelessness. That report and subsequent studies told the sad stories of stateless people.

“I am very much in love with a woman, but her father refused to allow us to marry, telling me that because I have no nationality, I have no future….To this day we both remain single,” a stateless Kurd in Syria told RI.

“There is no health, no sanitation, no education,” said a stateless Bihari in Bangladesh.

A Bidoon man in the United Arab Emirates said that being stateless is like “a boat without a port.” (In Arabic, Bidoon means “without”, and several hundred thousand stateless people in the Persian Gulf states do feel that they lack protection.)

RI has been campaigning tirelessly to combat statelessness. The U.S. State Department and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees have boosted the number of people working on statelessness. One result is that the State Department’s annual human rights report is beginning to focus on statelessness as a denial of human rights. Congress is taking an interest.

Despite increasing interest, the U.S. has not taken a leadership role on statelessness. The U.S. has not signed two key UN Conventions, the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

There are some encouraging developments. In recent years Kuwait has granted citizenship to some 40,000 Bidoons, including Bidoon husbands of Kuwaiti women. Recent media reports, however, suggest that the rights of an estimated 100,000 Bidoon in the country still cannot avail themselves of a right to an effective nationality. While Kuwait has set a good example to begin the process of reducing statelessness, there is much to be done.

Until the U.S. and other nations begin to take statelessness more seriously, countries harboring large stateless populations will feel little pressure to make citizen rights and protections available.