National District deputy Vinicio Castillo Seman says that United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who is visiting the Dominican Republic next week, is coming to pressure the Dominican government to approve a ruling for Naturalization Law 169-14, which would naturalize around half a million Haitians who claim to have been born here. Ban Ki-moon is arriving on an official visit on Monday 15 July 2014.
Castillo Seman says the ruling as proposed violates the Constitution, Law 169-14 and Constitutional Court ruling 168-13. “The Dominican people need to know, that, just as the United Nations has openly called for fast-tracked Dominican nationality for more than 500,000 Haitian citizens who claim they have been born in our territory, the essential objective of the visit is to pressure the President Medina and the Dominican government to sign the ruling that United Nations officials have worked on with Dominican government officials,” he said, as reported in Diario Libre and El Nuevo Diario. He said that Medina should take advantage of the visit to remind the United Nations to take on their own responsibilities and help Haiti. “If they are so concerned about the human rights of the Haitian citizens who live in the DR and their lack of documentation, then we have to ask what that organization has done on matters of civil registry and identity in Haiti in the past 20 years,” he said.
He said this is the same sort of pressure that the UN and the United States put on President Balaguer in 1994 and has continued to do throughout the past decades.
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