Today, I watched 15 to 30 minutes of Hoy Mismo, a live program described as leader in opinion content in the Dominican Republic according to its broadcaster, Color Vision. On their last segment, they held a brief interview featuring Alejandro Moscoso, who is the Commissioner for the Reform and Modernization of Justice in the Dominican Republic and a UNICEF representative.
With much enthusiasm, Moscoso thanked the program for the opportunity to launch from said honorable venue a joint-campaign aiming to promote the rights of children in the Dominican Republic, and specifically, according to the UNICEF officer, the right of every child to "a birth registration and nationality".
Birth registration and nationality rights in the Dominican Republic are pending topics, that had caught great national and international media attention during the last year, but suddenly dropped from coverage for reasons I cannot attribute to lack of newsworthiness, but instead to one of the greatest problems in Dominican press: self-censorship.
Interestingly, after the UNICEF officer mentioned ‘right to a birth registration’ and 'right to nationality’, one of the commentators-interviewers, Cristian Jimenez, stepped into the topic, remarking that it is one very serious problem in the Dominican Republic and that it needed to be examined adopting a serious character, instead of simply evading it as many do, specially in the case of “children of Haitian origin”.
Again, due to the ongoing self-censorship in the Dominican Republic, I was surprised for what seemed to me the renewal of courage and values in Dominican journalism. Jimenez had just stepped into it; he had just acknowledged the very existence of controversy and even lack of seriousness from authorities when addressing the topic…
Attentively, I waited for Jimenez to throw a follow-up question addressing the Commissioner or the UNICEF representative on the matter of children of Haitian origin born in the Dominican Republic. But he failed to do so.
Needless to say, neither the UNICEF officer nor the Commissioner for the Reform and Modernization of Justice in the Dominican Republic further developed any response to Cristian Jimenez’s initial comment on children of Haitian origin. In short, they all knew it was an important topic, but just decided to not say further about it.
That was it. Before closing time arrived, Hoy Mismo aired several of the promotional spots for the new campaign that the Commissioner for the Reform and Modernization of Justice in the Dominican Republic had just announced; the UNICEF representative thanked the program for their support in the topic, and yet, carrying the most poignant of sarcasms, a phrase voiced by children on the promotional spots still pounds in the back of my head: “without a birth registration we do not exist”.
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Thursday, August 31
Hoy Mismo
by
Rene
on Thu 31 Aug 2006 11:53 AM EDT
Monday, July 10
Help us help them: Dominican Children of Haitian Origin
by
Rene
on Mon 10 Jul 2006 07:19 PM EDT
There is a group of people working to stop arbitrary denationalization of Dominican children of Haitian origin. Help us help them. In solidarity, we ask for "All human rights for all children of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic!" Please, see the following PDF file attachment.
 1 AttachmentsThursday, July 6
Walking around
by
Rene
on Thu 06 Jul 2006 09:15 AM EDT
This is my post to say I am resuming blogging on this weblog. Reasons for being away for so long cannot be justified without adding some sense of fear and insecurity about the situation of Haitians, Dominican children of Haitian origin and their human rights defenders in Dominican territory. Who else is doing the human rights work that needs to be done? I am sure many could be, but what if not? What if the same way that I think that others must be doing it, they think that I am doing it too? Will we remain bystanders of their luck? Are the things that I have done offline, on a lower profile, enough to spare me from distress? Will they spare them from distress? Who will do what next? A day like today I remember Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who grieved writing words such as "It so happens that I grow tired of being a man" and "there are mirrors that should have cried out of shame and fright."
Thursday, December 15
Supreme Court abdicates on its role
by
Rene
on Thu 15 Dec 2005 06:44 PM EST
His name is Eduardo Jorge Prats*. Here, Clave Digital makes a good work quoting him on why he considered the Supreme Court of Justice of the Dominican Republic to have abdicated; the quote
He compared the situation with that of the Legislative Branch proceeding to unduly ground the concept of prior restraint and censorship - a subject matter of freedom of expression, embodied in the Dominican Constitution. [hypothetical] According to the source, he also expressed concern about how the Supreme Court opinion may expose the Dominican Republic to face international reprehension.
* [Red as an indicator of his first name; blue for both -common usage- of his last names; here, Jorge, the last name, is not to be mistaken with Jorge, a first name which is very common in Spanish, like Pedro, Miguel, José and Juan.]
Another example: Not all Dominicans think the same
by
Rene
on Thu 15 Dec 2005 04:00 PM EST
Eduardo Jorge Prats, an expert in Constitutional Law, criticized the Supreme Court opinion. Some considerations credited to him by Listín Diario, under the title The Supreme Court of Justice Abdicated advance that:
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