I am Jean Robert Dery, National Director of the Jesuite Service for Migrants and a representative of the World Council of Churches In September 2013, the Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic made the decision to strip the nationality of more than 200,000 Dominicans with Verdict 168-13. This verdict was condemned by the United Nations, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and by other governments. Given this international pressure, the Dominican government published law 169-14 according to which Dominicans who have become stateless can recover their citizenship after two years. However, 4 years have passed since the publication of this law, and no stateless Dominican has been able to recover his or her citizenship. This shows that law 169-14 is not a solution to the problems for the simple and good reason that we cannot continue to build upon that which is false and without foundation. Therefore, I ask you Madame Chair, what will you do, through the United Nations, to work with the Dominican Republic so that it can pull itself together and people can recover their citizenship by the same means that they were deprived of it? So we ask that a study is carried out and made public to see what the results are of the decisions made by the government to resolve the issue of statelessness in the Dominican Republic. Since we already know that no law of the government can solve the problem, it is necessary that a new verdict is enacted to guarantee the rights of Dominicans affected by verdict 168-13. Thank Madame Chair!

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