Melis­sa Doughty

Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar says she will mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and will con­sult Cari­com's sec­re­tary gen­er­al Ir­win La Rocque and the Cari­com Bu­reau on the best way for­ward to find­ing a res­o­lu­tion to the mat­ter.She made the com­ment af­ter UWI-based arts group Jou­vay Ay­i­ti vis­it­ed her St Clair of­fice, Port-of-Spain, yes­ter­day to de­liv­er a pe­ti­tion with over 800 sig­na­tures from the Caribbean and its di­as­po­ra call­ing for trade and oth­er em­bar­goes to be placed on the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic.

The group has added its voice to glob­al calls con­demn­ing the Sep­tem­ber 25 rul­ing by the Do­mini­can Con­sti­tu­tion­al Tri­bunal which ren­dered many Do­mini­cans of Hait­ian de­scent state­less.The group donned J'Ou­vert-like cos­tumes, such as moko jumbies, dev­ils and book­men, dur­ing yes­ter­day's ac­tion and al­so de­liv­ered the pe­ti­tion to the Do­mini­can Em­bassy at Queen's Park West, Port-of-Spain, be­fore end­ing at the PM's of­fice.

In a re­lease to the me­dia last evening, the of­fice said the PM ac­knowl­edge re­ceipt of the pe­ti­tion "in sup­port of Do­mini­cans of Hait­ian de­scent, fol­low­ing the Sep­tem­ber 2013 rul­ing of the Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, which strips Do­mini­can cit­i­zen­ship from im­mi­grants en­ter­ing the coun­try since 1929 and that of their off­spring.

"Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar has not­ed with great con­cern the is­sues raised in the let­ter. She recog­nis­es the dif­fi­cul­ty and un­cer­tain­ty that those per­sons in the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic whose sta­tus and rights have been cast in doubt now face."Equal­ly, the Prime Min­is­ter re­spects the sov­er­eign in­de­pen­dence of the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic and of its Con­sti­tu­tion­al Court," the re­lease said.The rul­ing, ac­cord­ing to Jou­vay Ay­i­ti's pe­ti­tion, has out­raged the in­ter­na­tion­al rights com­mu­ni­ty.

The group's di­rec­tor, Rawle Gib­bons, de­fined the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic's rul­ing as out­ra­geous and said a dan­ger­ous prece­dent had been cre­at­ed.Cari­com, he said, had a pri­ma­ry re­spon­si­bil­i­ty to re­spond to the is­sue, adding a "weak kind of state­ment" had been made but that was late and in­ef­fec­tu­al.How­ev­er, Dr Jose Serulle Ramia, am­bas­sador for the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic to Trinidad, said claims that ap­prox­i­mate­ly 300,000 Hait­ian de­scen­dants would be de­port­ed from the coun­try in the wake of the rul­ing were false.

In­stead, he said, the Hait­ian de­scen­dants have been giv­en two years to reg­u­larise. He in­vit­ed Per­sad-Bisses­sar to send a del­e­ga­tion to ob­serve the reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion process. De­por­ta­tion, he said, was on­ly ap­plic­a­ble to those en­ter­ing the coun­try now in an il­le­gal way.

Asked about calls for the coun­try's ap­pli­ca­tion to Cari­com/Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank to be re­viewed and a trade em­bar­go placed on the coun­try, Ramia said Caribbean coun­tries were like broth­er and sis­ter and should not act like en­e­mies. He said those pro­pos­als were against the sol­i­dar­i­ty of the peo­ples of the Caribbean.