Amidst the public airing of major irregularities in civil registration offices under the Central Electoral Board (JCE) jurisdiction, the JCE announces it will be using RD$29 million to house the offices of the Segunda Circunscripcion del Estado Civil del Distrito Nacional, as published in Hoy newpaper. The new civil registry office is intended to be a model office. Judge Roberto Rosario Marquez announced that tenders would be held for all contracting involved in the construction. Furthermore, he announced that as of January, the JCE would set fixed salaries for civil registry officers and other key officers in its departments.
Hoy newspaper editorial today comments on the estimated two million persons living in the DR who do not have legal identity. This is despite millions in government funding for the JCE for this purpose over the years.
The newspaper highlights that the situation is more serious because those who are in this condition, perpetuate the condition when they have children. “A state that prides itself on being organized cannot explain or justify such high numbers of undocumented persons. Neither can it explain why nothing is being done to reverse this situation,” writes the editorialist.
The newspaper highlights that the lack of government support to resolve this situation has resulted in several cases to solutions outside the law, or forgery and other methods. The newspaper says there is no easy solution, but the government needs to shuffle ways to make the process of legalizing a person less tedious and costly, so that it is always possible to confirm a person’s origin.
The president of the Central Electoral Board, Luis Arias, has said that late birth declarations are a “national calamity”, and promised that the creation of a new unit at the JCE would deal exclusively with the problem. Arias has denied that there were as many as two million people in the country who are not in possession of legal documents due to the lack of a birth certificate. Arias said, “If in the latest census there were eight million or so people, and at the JCE we have voter registration records for 5.3 million people, it is not logical that there can be two million people without documents.” Magistrate Roberto Rosario told reporters that the World Bank would be providing US$20 million in order for the JCE to create a specialized department that will deal exclusively with the problem of late birth records.
Meanwhile, Luis Felipe Rodriguez, the civil registry officer who was dismissed for using his office’s collections to help people regularize their status, said that he would be taking his case to court and “to the last of consequences.” Rodriguez made headlines for his successful program that legalized 4,000 Dominicans in record time and his proposal to legalize another 25,000 with the money generated by his former office. The program brought out into the open the fact that other officers were pocketing revenues collected at their civil registry offices. Rodriguez had demanded that the service of providing birth certificates should be free of charge, and that civil registry offices should be assigned wages from the funds they generate, not from the increase the JCE will be requesting in the 2006 budget.