Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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at COB and requested interviews from them.
Those who participated in the 2012 portion of the study reflected a broad set of opinions: from those affected by statelessness and those affected by the presence of Bahamian-born individuals of Haitian descent in their communities, to those who held leadership positions in diverse professions that come into contact with individuals of Haitian descent (such as the armed forces, the police, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, health professionals, lawyers, and teachers). In total, I interviewed thirty-seven individuals for the Bahamian case study. Of these, twenty-three were Bahamian of non-Haitian descent, seven were registered or naturalized Bahamians,45 six were foreign residents (American or Haitian), and the remaining person was born in The Bahamas of Haitian descent who had not yet applied to register as a Bahamian. The majority of the interviewees were black (twenty-seven) and male (twenty-four).
In addition to the thirty-seven interviews from The Bahamas, I traveled to the Dominican Republic in the summer of 2012 and the spring of 2013. I interviewed ten individuals in the capital, Santo Domingo, and five in the batey46 of El Caño in the province of Monte Plata. Four of the five participants from the batey were stateless, while one had previously been in that situation but now had her documents to prove Dominican citizenship. The interviewees from Santo Domingo consisted of two UN officials, nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, lawyers, a diplomat from the Haitian Embassy, academics, as well as the local representative of the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI). Of the fifteen interviewees, six were Dominican (one had previously been stateless), five were foreign residents, and four were presently stateless or unable to prove Dominican nationality. The majority of the interviewees were black47 (ten) and female (ten).
Participants for this part of the fieldwork once again reflect diverse viewpoints on the effects, and existence, of statelessness in the country. As in the Bahamian 2009 portion of the study, I selected the majority of the interviewees from Santo Domingo via purposeful sampling, although a few individuals were contacted via the snowball technique. I did not purposefully select the participants from El Caño, however. I was part of a group that went to listen to a town hall meeting on nationality deprivation in that batey and I consequently ended up informally interviewing five of the attendees (all women). Two additional interviews were conducted in New York City with two other members of OSJI earlier in 2012 on the subject of statelessness in the Caribbean.
In all cases, with the exception of the email interview response from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I recorded and transcribed the interviews. Since I am interested in the participants’ experiences with, and knowledge of statelessness, noncitizen rights, and state membership practices, the interviews were semistructured. I did not constrain our conversations solely to the interview questions that I had, but was open to the interviewee leading the dialogue in other directions. This often allowed me to discover information that I had not originally thought was important or pointed me to new directions of inquiry. The semistructured interview approach therefore allowed me to collect a series of responses to common questions, but also added a richness to the narratives that I perhaps would not have been able to capture otherwise. Such an approach, I believe, is appropriate for examining the lived realities of exclusionary state membership practices and their effects upon people’s sense of belonging and ability to access rights in practice.
Besides the fifty-five semistructured interviews, I engaged in participant observation in a number of settings in the Caribbean and the United States as a means of assessing how individuals engage with each other on questions surrounding statelessness, migration, and human rights. In 2009, I attended the Second Annual Youth Conclave, sponsored by the United Haitian Association of The Bahamas, which addressed problems of discrimination and ways to empower the Haitian-descended youth in the country. Many of the young people present had faced obstacles growing up in The Bahamas and felt ostracized.
In 2012, I attended a coyuntura (town hall meeting) on the effects of Dominican migration law at the Centro Bonó48 in Santo Domingo where members of the public, Dominican lawyers, and migration experts from the International Organization for Migration discussed the effects of Dominican migration law upon persons of Haitian descent. I also witnessed an impromptu celebration at the Centro Bonó when a group of Dominicans of Haitian descent, deprived of their citizenship documents, came to the organization to thank it for the legal assistance it had provided to them. Also in 2012, I attended an event commemorating the life and work of Dominican activist Sonia Pierre49 at Columbia University in New York City, listening to the stories that her children, close friends, and colleagues shared with the audience.
In 2013, I attended a panel discussion on statelessness hosted by the Sociocultural Movement for Haitian Workers (MOSCTHA-USA),50 also at Columbia University, and participated in an invitation-only symposium hosted by the Centro Bonó, the Mesa Nacional para Migrantes y Refugiados (MENAMIRD), the Red de Encuentro Dominico-Haitiano Jacques Viau, and the Observatorio Migrantes del Caribe (OBMICA) in Santo Domingo. Both events focused on the right to a nationality in the Dominican context and included speakers from the Dominican government and civil society.51 I took part in a similar, but public, conference on statelessness at the College of The Bahamas in 201252 and listened via the internet to the follow-up conference that took place in 2014.53 At the invitation of the Norwegian Refugee Council, I was also part of the civil society team that took part in the Caribbean subregional deliberations in Cayman for UNHCR’s Cartagena +30 process, from which a regional Plan of Action for the Americas resulted that includes a chapter on statelessness.54
As a Bahamian, I have spent many hours in The Bahamas informally chatting with “citizens” and “noncitizens” at supermarkets, retail stores, religious venues, and in their homes about Bahamian membership practices, Haitian migrants, and discrimination. I have thus had multiple opportunities to hear diverse viewpoints on citizenship denial and deprivation, the issues associated with statelessness, and the efforts that have been, or should be, undertaken to alleviate the problem.
In addition to fieldwork, I use various primary and secondary sources to challenge the postnational claim of the decoupling of human rights from citizenship and to examine the ways in which democracies engage in forced displacement. I examine the nationality, migration laws, and constitutions of The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti—as well as legal assessments by experts on the latter country—to identify how individuals ought to be covered as nationals under a given law in theory. I stress “in theory” because, in practice, individuals may fall under the operation of a given state’s law as a national, but in reality they do not possess said state’s citizenship. Both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, for example, deny that statelessness is an issue on their territories. They point to Article 11 of the Haitian Constitution, which declares that any person born of a Haitian mother or father who has not renounced her or his Haitian citizenship is also a Haitian at birth (Government of Haiti 2011). These governments’ position is that the offspring of Haitian migrants born on their soil are Haitian citizens through their parents. It therefore does not matter whether or not they have Bahamian or Dominican citizenship.
Yet, as UNHCR’s Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons makes clear, determining whether an individual is stateless “requires a careful analysis of how a State applies its nationality laws in an individual’s case in practice” (2014g, 12; italics added). UNHCR asserts that “The reference to ‘law’ in Article 1(1) [of the 1954 statelessness convention] should be read broadly to encompass not just legislation, but also ministerial decrees, regulations, orders, judicial case law (in countries with a tradition of precedent) and, where appropriate, customary practice” (12) when determining whether a person is stateless. Such an approach, they contend, “may lead to a different conclusion than one derived from a purely objective analysis of the application of nationality laws of a country to an individual’s case” (13). Using such an approach, I find—and illustrate in Chapters 3 and 4—that many individuals of Haitian descent, born in The Bahamas or the Dominican Republic of Haitian migrants do not fall under the operation of Haitian law in practice. They are consequently forced into liminality—a place where