Human rights in the Dominican Republic
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Human rights in the Dominican Republic constitute the civil and political rights and freedoms legally protected under the Constitution of the Dominican Republic and enforced by the government through common and statutory law. The majority of human rights disputes are presided over by the highest court of constitutional appeal, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal.[1] These rights and freedoms have developed over time in accordance with the Dominican Republic's expansion from the former Spanish colony of the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo to its modern state formation. The history of human rights in the state have also been marked by the oscillation between democratic administrations, such as the current presidency of Danilo Medina, and authoritarian administrations, most significantly the dictatorial regime of Rafael Trujillo between 16 August 1930 and 16 August 1938.[2] As a member of the Organization of American States and the United Nations, the Dominican Republic is party to myriad legal treaties and covenants which propagate the human rights standards of the international community and have integrated the majority of these human rights directives into their domestic legislation.
The various administrations of the Dominican Republic have historically come under fire for their poor human rights record, which includes extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary arrest and detention, attacks on press freedoms and restrictions on the movement of migrants.[3] Certain groups and minorities in Dominican society including the Haitian ethnic minority, women and LGBTQI+ citizens have been the victims of grave abuses of their human rights, attracting widespread condemnation from the international community. In particular, the government's treatment of Dominicans with Haitian parentage earned the country a place on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’s “black list” in April 2017, a list reserved for countries with the most serious violations of human rights.[1] This was primarily due to the 2013 Constitutional Tribunal decision which deprived ethnically Haitian Dominicans of citizenship and the government's following inability to compensate for and correct the discriminatory treatment in the wake of international outcry.[4]