Dominican Republic: How Statelessness Threatens Women and Families

http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/dominican-republic-how-statelessness-threatens-women-and-families

VOICES

Dominican Republic: How Statelessness Threatens Women and Families

October 16, 2013   by Liliana Gamboa & Laura Bingham   Open Society Justice Initiative 

The president of the Dominican Republic, Danilo Medina, opened a regional conference on women's issues this week in the capital, Santo Domingo. But even as he prepared to tell delegates of his country's commitment to "fundamental rights" for women, a group of women launched a small protest.

The cardboard signs they held up highlighted the plight of tens of thousands of Dominican women who are reeling from a shocking blow to their rights: a ruling by the country’s constitutional court that threatens to strip them and their families of the right to Dominican nationality, previously guaranteed by the country’s constitution.

All are Dominicans of Haitian descent – whose families originally came to work and then settled in the Dominican Republic during the 20th century.

Perhaps the women’s conference will pause to consider the plight of Juliana Deguis Pierre, a 29 year old recognized Dominican national, whose Haitian migrant parents moved to the country decades ago. Juliana, a Dominican-born mother of four children, is officially registered as a Dominican citizen by birth. As she puts it in her own words, “I am from this country and nothing is going to change that.”

But according to the constitutional court she no longer meets the criteria for acquisition of Dominican nationality, and neither do all individuals similarly situated. The ruling renders her and her family stateless, without access to the rights and benefits of citizenship, such as a birth certificate, a passport and access to government medical insurance and education.

From 1929 until January 26, 2010, the constitution granted nationality to all children born on Dominican territory, except for those born to diplomats and to parents who were “in transit” at the time of the child’s birth. Throughout this long period, many children of undocumented Haitian migrants, who were born in the Dominican Republic, were registered as Dominican. They were provided with identity documents confirming their Dominican nationality, and lived their lives as any other Dominican would.

In recent years, however, the Dominican Republic has started to claim that individuals of Haitian descent have no right to Dominican nationality, on the theory that their undocumented parents were “in transit,” even when these families had been in the country for multiple generations. The Dominican Republic refused to change course on such policies even after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a binding judgment in 2005 to end them. 

The constitutional court’s recent ruling [pdf, Spanish only] has further cemented and expanded upon these haunting, openly racist nationality policies, by ordering the retrospective denationalizations of all persons whose parents were not legal residents in the Dominican Republic, rendering an ever-growing number of Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless.

To make matter worse, the ruling calls for the retroactive application of this determination to 1929, possibly rendering stateless up to four generations of Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent.

Stateless persons are in a state of permanent vulnerability.  Denied access to birth certificates, passports, or other identification documents, stateless persons become, in effect, “non-persons” with no claim on governments who deny their existence and refuse to protect their most basic rights. They are systematically denied access to the full range of public goods and services essential to a decent existence, from freedom of movement and police protection, to healthcare, education, housing, and employment. Stateless populations are condemned to a cycle of poverty that is passed from generation to generation.

In the context of the regional women’s conference, organized by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and attended by the executive secretary of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the Dominican authorities should reflect upon the impact that this decision will have on all Dominicans of Haitian descent, and particularly on women and children.

Other states in the region should step up and call for solutions that will respect the rights and inherent dignity of all, first and foremost by reminding their neighbor that statelessness is a regional issue. The creation of thousands upon thousands of stateless women and children cannot be tolerated under any circumstances.

Learn More:

Latin America & the Caribbean, Rights & Justice, Discrimination, Women

Nonprofit Review: Congress promises multiple investigations of possible wrongdoing at charities

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/congress-to-review-financial-wrongdoing-at-charities/2013/11/01/9471f04c-430d-11e3-a751-f032898f2dbc_story.html#!

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Congress promises multiple investigations of possible wrongdoing at charities

Published: November 1

Federal and state officials, troubled that nonprofit organizations have quietly lost millions of dollars to financial wrongdoing, this week launched multiple investigations into whether the groups properly reported losses to authorities.

Three ranking senators and a House committee chairman said they were distressed about new revelations regarding what are known as “significant diversions” of assets. Regulators in seven states and the District also said they moved this week to scrutinize how well nonprofits are safeguarding charitable funds meant to serve their communities.

Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, opened an investigation into legal issues related to the diversions. He launched a second probe into an alleged $3.4 million embezzlement at the Washington-based American Legacy Foundation.

“The public should know when charitable dollars are diverted,” Grassley said in a statement. “Tax-exempt dollars are meant for tax-exempt purposes, not bankrolling someone’s personal Champagne lifestyle.”

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said he will ask the Government Accountability Office to look into many of the same issues.

On the other side of the Capitol, Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, issued a statement calling it “vital that nonprofits account for, and accurately report, how their funds are used, even when the worst happens and funds are misused.”

Charity regulators from Maryland to Hawaii said that a database of diversions, developed and made public this week by The Washington Post, gave them an additional weapon in their fight to identify wayward nonprofits and focus their limited investigative resources.

D.C. Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said the database provides “a valuable tool for screening whether nonprofits are fulfilling their basic obligation to protect the charitable assets entrusted to them.”

In New York, the state attorney general’s office is “reviewing the database and will be following up with a number of the charities listed,” said David E. Nachman, the office’s chief of enforcement for charities.

In Hawaii, regulators said they had contacted one charity named in the database that appeared to have failed to disclose the amounts and circumstances of its loss.

“You’ve basically given us all homework,” said Hugh R. Jones, Hawaii’s supervising deputy attorney general for the charities division.

The officials were responding to an investigation, published Sunday, in which The Post identified more than 1,000 larger nonprofits that in recent years disclosed that they had suffered significant diversions of their assets — many acts of fraud and embezzlement.

The diversions highlighted in the article totaled hundreds of millions of dollars. But the investigation also found that in apparent violation of federal reporting rules, many of the organizations failed to include the amount they lost and other key details in their disclosures.

The largest diversion identified in the investigation was $106 million, the amount Yeshiva University and its affiliates said they lost in a Ponzi scheme linked to Bernie Madoff.

In Legacy’s case, the foundation believes that it lost $3.4 million to a former executive. The Post reported that after a whistleblower came forward, Legacy officials waited almost three years before notifying authorities. On its federal disclosure, the foundation reported that its loss had been “in excess of $250,000.”

On Friday, Grassley sent Legacy a six-pageletter seeking answers to 30 detailed questions about its financial practices. A Legacy spokeswoman said the foundation would respond after reviewing it. In a statement, Grassley called it “stunning that diversion appears to be so common.”

“That should be a wake-up call to the IRS, law enforcement and every tax-exempt organization,” Grassley said. “Without this kind of disclosure, law enforcement and charitable donors might never learn of diversion. And let’s call ‘diversion’ what it is a lot of the time – old-fashioned stealing.”

Coburn said he had long been concerned about accountability at nonprofit organizations. In July, he asked the GAO to conduct a wide-ranging review of the IRS’s oversight of tax-exempt organizations.

“These cases are yet another wake-up call for Congress,” Coburn said. “It is immoral and unethical to ask taxpayers to subsidize charities that are not following the law.”

Orrin Hatch of Utah, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said that he will be taking a “serious look” at the issue and that the IRS has an obligation to crack down on charities that game the system.

Bennett Rushkoff, chief of the D.C. attorney general’s public advocacy section, said that before The Post’s investigation, he was unaware that federal law required nonprofits to disclose diversions in their reports and added that he will start using the data.

“I would expect that a lot of the state attorneys general will want to know from these nonprofits how they would have answered the required questions, had they answered them,” Rushkoff said. “If they are tolerating embezzlement, that raises a question about whether they are fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities.”

Rushkoff said he had not previously known of the alleged embezzlement at Legacy, adding that he could not say publicly which nonprofits would be under greater scrutiny from his office.

In Maryland and Oregon, regulators said they lacked enough staff to examine every paper disclosure. “We’ll look at all of them” in the database, said Peter Fosselman, Maryland’s deputy secretary of state.

A number of news organizations across the nation — and one in Israel — also have used the database to identify and examine nonprofits.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that a Wisconsin charity it found, Shepherds Baptist Ministries, lost nearly $500,000, allegedly to its former financial controller. Business First of Buffalo reported that in 2008, the local Society of St. Vincent de Paul lost $360,000 to embezzlement, allegedly by a former bookkeeper.

joe.stephens@washpost.com

marypat.flaherty@washpost.com