Critical analysis of sentence TC/0168/13

Abstract

On September the 23^rd 2013, the Dominican Republic's Constitutional Tribunal issued ruling TC/ 0168/13. On it, the Tribunal established a precedent under which the children of undocumented immigrants born in the Dominican Republic are not considered Dominican, retroactive to 1929. To get to this result, it applied criteria which were only enshrined on the Constitution in 2010.

The Tribunal's ruling has been criticized both for its effect on the children of undocumented migrants, and for its infringement of fundamental Rule of Law tenets. Among these, the non retroactivity of the law, the infringement of the right to legal certainty and the right to nationality.

Also ignored was the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling Yean y Bosico v. Dominican Republic, which had already touched on the subject for those born before 2010. As a matter of fact, the Constitutional Tribunal also issued ruling TC/0256/14, which pretends to strip the IaCHR of its jurisdiction over the Dominican Republic.

In this essay we examine the reasoning behind ruling TC/0168/13 and the criticism leveled against it.