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”.