According to a daily roundup of news from the Dominican Republic, on November 4th, in a 59-page ruling (Judgment 256-14), the Constitutional Court “annulled the country’s participation in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)…this means that none of the cases ruled upon by the IACtHR are [sic] valid for application in the Dominican Republic. The Constitutional Court ruling established that the Dominican Congress never validated the membership in the Inter-American Human Rights Court and thus declared null and void the jurisdiction of the IACtHR over the Dominican Republic.”

This shocking decision came on the heels of a recent ruling by the IACtHR that the human rights of Dominicans of Haitian descent are being violated. As the Washington-based Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights notes, “This latest judgment was issued in the context of an ongoing international outcry over last year’s Constitutional Court judgment (TC-168-13), which discriminatorily stripped hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent of their nationality, rendering them stateless. Earlier this year the Dominican government passed a Naturalization Law (169-14), which was billed as a solution to the massive humanitarian crises created by ruling 168-13. However, the law actually further entrenched the discriminatory ruling for the majority of affected individuals – forcing hundreds of thousands of Dominican citizens to self-report as foreigners or face forcible expulsions. The most recent Constitutional Court judgment (TC-256-14) was published less than two weeks after the IACtHR ruled in the case of Expelled Dominican and Haitian Persons vs. the Dominican Republic that both judgment 168-13 and certain provisions of law 169-14 violate the government’s binding obligations under the American Convention on Human Rights, including the right to nationality and the right to identity.” CONTINUES

The Dominican Republic’s possible withdrawal from the Inter American Human Rights Court: What is CARICOM’s position?