The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

HAITI this month joined Jamaica to become the second country in CARICOM to become a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

The convention sets rules for the conferral and non-withdrawal of citizenship, in an effort to combat statelessness.

The rules include granting nationality to people born in territories who would otherwise be stateless.

Haiti’s decision does not affect The Bahamas, which is not a signatory to the convention.

However, in a statement yesterday, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Immigration spokesman said this country already has mechanisms in its laws to deal with statelessness.

“…The policy and the law of the Bahamas is that one obtains citizenship by descent, which means through your parents,” the ministry’s spokesman, Al Dillete, said. “There are no plans to change that. The ministry further observes that there are existing mechanisms in Bahamian law to deal with statelessness. In the case of individuals born in the Bahamas of foreign parentage, including those born to Haitian parentage; those persons are not stateless at birth nor thereafter.”

The Bahamas government has maintained that based on Haitian law, no matter where they are born, children of Haitian descent are Haitian at birth. According to existing policy, such people would require a Haitian passport and a residence permit to be in The Bahamas.

Nonetheless, activists and scholars have said for years that there are thousands of “de facto” stateless people born to Haitian parents living in the Bahamas, people with no ties to Haiti. Advocates for constitutional reform of citizenship provisions have argued that the Bahamas’ citizenship laws contravene various international conventions that relate to statelessness.