IDB opens new office in Haiti
PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti (CMC) – Five years after a powerful earthquake caused widespread damage and death in Haiti, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has inaugurated a new country office building in the French-speaking Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country while pledging its commitment to help rebuild the country.
IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno described the event as “one of transition, shifting from primarily addressing urgent post-quake demands related to the most basic elements, such as providing food, shelter and water, to a more forward-looking set of sustainable initiatives that will improve lives”.
More than 200 people, including Prime Minister Evans Paul, Haiti’s Finance Minister and IDB Governor Wilson Laleau as well as other members of the Government and the diplomatic community attended the ceremony.
The IDB said that the new building houses one of the IDB’s largest country offices, with 85 full-time personnel, “all dedicated to working with the government and private sector to build institutional capacity, improve quality of life, and increase economic opportunity in the Caribbean nation”.
It said the building was designed and constructed to meet the most stringent of international structural and seismic standards and incorporates a number of sustainability features, including solar panels for electricity generation, rainwater harvesting, insulated walls, and occupancy sensors for lighting control. The building also utilizes an open space plan, which contributes to and reflects the Bank’s goals of efficiency, collaboration, innovation, and transparency.
The IDB said the completion of the building coincided with the midpoint of the its 10-year, US$2.2 billion commitment to support the Haitian Government’s efforts to improve the efficiency of its operations, increase economic opportunities and improve quality of life.
Following the 2010 earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people, the IDB announced that it was pardoning Haiti’s $484 million in debt and agreed to provide all future aid in the form of non-reimbursable grants, at the rate of US$200 million a year from 2010 through 2020.
Dominican Republic Deportations Affects Haiti Border Region
TeleSUR - The deportation of thousands of Haitians will have an adverse effect on some parts of the Dominican economy. Tensions have been mounting in the northern border region between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, as Dominican officials start enforcing new strict immigration policies that could see up to 30,000 Haitians deported. The border town of Dajabon has long been a popular spot for Haitians to find work, either in the service or agricultural sectors, or to buy and sell market goods. Border officials have traditionally allowed these temporary crossings, as many of the Haitians return to Haiti at the end of the day.
According to reports from the Washington Post Wednesday, the new immigration regulations in the Dominican Republic will make this open border and working scenario much harder for Haitians, while it will also have a huge impact on the local economy that depends on Haitian labor and business. “They make our economy dynamic,” Ana Carrasco, a Dominican restaurant owner in Dajabon told the Washington Post. “People come to buy eggs, chicken, spaghetti. If they don’t buy it in this market, they don’t eat. Hunger doesn’t have a flag, nor a border, nor a color, nor politics. It’s hunger. It’s necessity.” Just as Haitians have come to depend on Dajabon to find work and food, local Dominican business owners in the town have come to rely on Haitians to supply much needed labor. “Haitians make our economy dynamic” “This issue affects my business, because my employees can’t come to work,” said Carrasco. According to Dominican rice farmer Hiroshi Rodriguez, the manual labor on his farm is done by trucked-in Haitian workers because “Dominicans don't want to work,” he told the Washington Post. The new stringent immigration laws are part of the Dominican Republic's new plan to “bring order to the country,” according to government officials. Tens of thousands of Haitians are expected to be deported since they are living in the country without proper papers, even though many of them were born there or have been there for years. Haitians were given a June 17 deadline to apply for residency permits, if they could prove they had lived in the Dominican Republic prior to 2011. RELATED: Haitian-American Author: Deportations 'State-Sponsored Open Season' The northern border area has also seen an influx of Haitians from all across the Dominican Republic, who have already started to leave through the Dajaban border crossing. According to reports by the Washington Post, some 12,000 Haitians have voluntarily fled, fearing that pending deportations could turn violent. Many Haitians have ended up in Ounaminthe across the border, not knowing what to do next.
The mayor of New York speaks out on the tragedy of the deported Haitians
In a declaration last week, the Mayor of the City of New York, Bill de Blasio, said he was extremely worried by the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from the Dominican Republic to Haiti, including many children, learnt HPN.
Bill de Blasio called on the Dominican government to respect the guaranteed fundamental rights for every people, including the Dominicans of Haitian origin, by virtue of international law.
"I also ask the government to avoid the inevitable errors, the dangers and the humiliation of deporting by force people from their homes. Among the people the most the affected by this action will be descendants of Haitians, born in the Dominican Republic, but who are inequitably deprived of their nationality and their legal status, simply because of their ancestry", declared the mayor of the City of New York.
"The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that the nationality is a fundamental law to all the individuals," continued Mr. De Blasio.
The mayor hopes to see a compassionate and human resolution to this alarming situation. HPN
The Dominican Republic Wants To Deport 60,000 Stateless Kids
THE HUFFINGTON POST
LAGUNA SALADA, Dominican Republic -- When the summer draws to a close, it should be time for Elaihi Chalis, 15, to go back to school.
But without a birth certificate, she says she won’t be able to enroll in her local high school and will have to stay home or find a job -- not only dashing her hopes to continue educating herself, but also limiting her ability to significantly contribute to national economy down the road. Going back to school is just one of Chalis' worries. Though she was born in this country, she and her mother say the hospital refused to provide documentation of her birth because her mother is an undocumented immigrant from Haiti. Like thousands of other minors, she does not have citizenship in either the Dominican Republic or Haiti, making her stateless. After the deadline to register with the Dominican government as a foreign national passed last week, Chalis now faces the threat of deportation.
"Why do they want to take us and send us to Haiti?" Chalis said in an interview with The Huffington Post. "I don't want to go. I don't know anything about Haiti."
A series of Dominican legal developments since 2004 have eliminated the concept of birthright citizenship here. A 2013 decision by the Constitutional Court applied the new standard retroactively, effectively stripping thousands of Dominican-born people of their citizenship.
Dominican officials have staunchly defended their widely criticized efforts to codify citizenship standards that exclude people born in the country to undocumented parents, arguing that sovereign countries have the right to decide their own citizenship laws. To highlight how reasonable their policies are, they point to a program that ended in February and was designed to restore citizenship to those who once held a Dominican national ID card or passport, and to allow people born in the country to register as foreign nationals with a two-year pathway to citizenship.
Roughly 56,000 people who had previously held Dominican passports or other national identification documents will have their citizenship restored through the plan, which ran for over eight months, officials say.
But fewer than 9,000 people born in the country who lack proper documentation signed up for the naturalization plan, a figure that immigrant rights groups and international human rights organizations say falls short of the roughly 200,000 people they think may have qualified. A coalition of nongovernmental organizations including Save the Children and World Vision says 60,000 of those stateless people are children or teenagers. The overwhelming majority of the Dominican Republic's stateless people are of Haitian descent and black, leading critics to say racism has played a role in pushing these policies forward.
A second plan to normalize the status of undocumented immigrants passed last week, leaving those who didn't register no further options for obtaining legal residence.
A visit to the Dominican Republic's impoverished countryside highlights the number of children who, like Chalis, have a claim to Dominican citizenship and missed the change to register for naturalization. It's a problem that promises to expand with time, as new generations of children born here to undocumented or stateless parents will continue to lack access to Dominican citizenship.
Dozens of children and teenagers in Laguna Salada who were born in this country say they left the hospital without proper documentation.
Part of problem is authorities who have refused to give birth certificates to children born to undocumented parents, people here say. Some parents say the hospital where their kids were born never gave them a record documenting the child's birth. Others say they gave birth at home -- which still occurs with some regularity in the Dominican countryside -- and that authorities said they had no way of proving the children weren't born in Haiti.
Bureaucratic inefficiency also plays a role. Many parents with several children say some received documentation at birth while others did not, without explanation.
Congresswoman Clarke asks the Dominican Republic to reconsider its policy
Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke published a statement on the humanitarian crisis in the Dominican Republic, where the government threatens to repatriate several hundred thousand Haitian.
"There are nearly a half million people of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic. 288,000 people registered to legalize their status to stay there, but reports indicate that 90 % of the candidates could not provide the required evidence, to have lived in Dominican Republic constantly since October, 2011.
Today, hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals and people of Haitian origin are threatened with eviction from the Dominican Republic, a policy which will only aggravate the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, which has not recovered from the 2010 earthquake with numerous families displaced from their homes. Many people targeted by the deportation were born in the Dominican Republic or have lived there for most of their lives […] As a result, I am profoundly worried by the policy requiring Haitians to carry with them documents proving their legal status in the Dominican Republic to avoid arrest [notes: all nationalities are concerned]. This is reminiscent of the policy of South Africa under apartheid, in which blacks had to carry a travel book. Without jobs in Haiti, without families to support them, or houses where to live, these displaced families will experience extreme poverty.
I implore the Government of the Dominican Republic to reconsider this deportation policy and to work with the community of Caribbean nations to prevent this useless crisis from occurring.
With my colleagues from the Congress and with the State Department, I am going to work to prevent the forced mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and people of Haitian origin from their homes."
The United States denounced the "discriminatory measures" against Haitian immigrants and their descendants in Dominican Republic.
The document notes the controversial decision of the Dominican Constitutional court of September, 2013, which fixes the parameters of acquisition for citizenship.
"This decision stipulates that the descendants of people considered illegal in the country, among whom many are of Haitian origin, do not have the right for the Dominican nationality," noted the report which is use as a guide for Congress to decide on granting assistance to every country."
This report examines the behavior of governments all over the world (except the United States) on human rights.
Last Monday, approximately 200 people gathered in front of the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Washington to press this country to stop the process of "deportation" of more than 200,000 people, including Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin who have become stateless, and could be expelled to Haiti.
The main fear of the NGO (NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION) and the international organizations is not only the risk of massive deportations, but the eviction of people born in the country, because they are the daughters and sons of Haitian illegal immigrants. This is taking place in spite of the fact that they played an important role in the social, economic and political life of the country, having been able to vote during the last presidential election which brought the president Medina to power.
50 % of the Haitian population consumes some contaminated water
The platform of the organizations of defense of human rights (POHDH), declared critical and alarming the water problem in Haiti. This statement was made during its traditional press conference last Friday under the theme: “The marginalization of the water a threat for human rights.”
The person in charge of education, culture and human rights for Alermy Kervilus’ platform, said that according to the last report by DINEPA, about 50 percent of the population uses some contaminated water and 30 % walk more than 30 minutes before finding some water.
For his part the executive secretary of the POHDH, Anthonal Mortime, considers this situation a violation of human rights, because the state is not taking care of the population. According to him, the right to water is a sacred right just as civil and political rights.