Luisa Fr Ansua was born in 1959 in ithe Dominican Republic (dr), has never left her country and her social-security card reads "Nationality: Dominican". But she has not been able to get a licence to practise as an educational psychologist, nor renew her passport in order to visit her daughter in Germany. The government says she is a foreigner because her parents were Haitian. For 75 years the Dominican Republic's constitution granted citizenship to almost everyone born in the country. But since 2007 the government has sought to deny the citizenship of people whose parents were illegal migrants, a policy incorporated in an amended constitution in 2010. Up to 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian origin may be affected. Almost 500 of them have complained to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (iachr) that they have been left stateless. The iachr has condemned the new policy. But on December 1st the dr's Supreme Court endorsed the new rule by rejecting a Dominican-born man's request for a birth certificate.
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