A/HRC/7/19/Add.5 A/HRC/7/23/Add.3 Page 20 denied their right to Dominican nationality and were effectively stateless and consequently suffered the effects, including the inability to attend school due to lack of identity documents. 69. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found that the Dominican Republic had violated the rights of children of Haitian ancestry and rendered them stateless by refusing to issue birth certificates and denying basic citizenship rights on the grounds of race. The Court recognized the right to nationality as the gateway to the enjoyment of all other rights and found that children who are denied birth certificates are also denied membership of a political community. The Court ordered the Government to: pay damages to the Yean and Bosico children; issue a public apology and publish the sentence; provide human rights training for State officials and adopt legislative and administrative measures to ensure equal access to birth certificates and school enrolment for all children in the country. As of December 2007, the Government had paid damages but had failed to comply with the other parts of the Court’s order. 70. The Dominican Government, in its consideration of the legal status of children born to Haitian parents, highlights the decision of the Dominican Supreme Court of 14 December 2005 in response to an appeal brought by a group of NGOs challenging the constitutionality of the Migration Law. This was equally considered to be a response to the Inter-American Court decision in the Yean and Bosico case. The Supreme Court held inter alia: “That the Constitution does not grant Dominican nationality indiscriminately to all persons born on Dominican soil, as the jus soli provision, which establishes the system to grant Dominican nationality, together with the jus sanguini, has two exceptions, which exclude the legitimate children of foreign diplomats and the children of foreigners in transit”; …“this implies that persons in transit have been in some way authorized to enter and stay for a certain period of time in the country; in this circumstance, which is obviously legitimate, the child of a foreign mother giving birth on national soil, as established by the Constitution, is not Dominican by birth…”; “Considering that the only case in which the Dominican Republic could be forced to grant Dominican nationality to a foreigner who is in breach of the law with respect to his/her situation in the country or a person that is born in the Dominican territory, who otherwise would be stateless, would be in application … of the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, adopted by the United Nations on 30 August 1961, which is not applicable in this case, as the persons concerned have, through the provision of jus sanguini, the nationality of their country, which excludes any possibility foreseen by the above-mentioned Convention with respect to statelessness, and thus the obligation on the Dominican State to grant its nationality to those citizens in the hypothesis set out in the Convention; that, in that respect, article 11 of the Haitian Constitution establishes categorically that ‘Any person born in Haiti, or in a foreign country, of a Haitian father or Haitian mother, is Haitian’”. 4. Circular 017 71. On 29 March 2007, the Central Electoral Board issued a document entitled Circular 017 to all civil registry officers requesting them to remain vigilant for fraudulent documents, abstain from issuing, signing or providing copies of such documents and to refer any such cases to the Administrative Chamber of the Central Electoral Board in Santo Domingo, on the grounds of “complaints indicating that some civil registry offices had in the past issued birth certificates in an irregular manner to children of foreign parents that did not prove their legal status or residence in the Dominican Republic”.