Dominican leader: You can’t strip a nationality if someone doesn’t have it

Santo Domingo.- President Danilo Medina denied in Cuba Wednesday that Dominican Republic strips the nationality of citizens, because "you can’t take away something they don’t have."

Medina, when CNN asked if his country was creating stateless persons in the wake of a Constitutional Court ruling, said it’s a mistake to believe that Dominican Republic strips the nationality from someone because the sentence refers to 1929 and appears retroactive, when in fact all of the country’s constitutions have had the same conditions since that year.

"What we’re seeking with this regularization process…, is how we will take a lot of people out of the legal limbo they are in, who neither have a Dominican nationality nor have made use of their Haitian nationality because Haiti’s Constitution establishes in its article 11 that regardless of where a son of a Haitian was born they are Haitian,” the chef executive said.

Medina reiterated that no one can remain in a stateless condition if their own country always recognizes their nationality.