Those who were rightly apprehensive about CARICOM having an invited observer presence at a meeting in Haiti on January 7 between the Dominican Republic and Haiti to discuss bilateral matters including trade and the environment, would be relieved by an official re-affirmation on Friday that there could be no business as usual with the DR so long as it maintains a new law that effectively denies citizenship to immigrants of Haitian descent.

That reaffirmation came from the CARICOM’s Secretary General, Irwin LaRocque, while welcoming Haiti’s first accredited ambassador to the 15-member Community, Mr Peterson Benjamin Noel at the Seretariat’s offices at Turkeyen.
It was consistent with a recent decision taken by the CARICOM Bureau, which functions as a management committee between meetings of Heads of Government, that since the relevant discriminatory law, as approved by  the DR’s constitutional court, was immoral and repugnant to basic human decency, it would be difficult to maintain normal good relations with that Spanish-speaking country of the Caribbean region.
The DR  is not a member of the Community but it belongs to the CARIFORUM group of countries as the mechanism for doing business with the European Union (EU).
And the EU is aware of CARICOM’s stand to suspend normal CARIFORUM relations with the DR unless it reverses the new law that has effectively rendered stateless  thousands of immigrants of Haitian descent.
Even prior to the decision of the CARICOM Bureau to cease any consideration of the DR  accessing membership of the Community, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had deemed  the law as ”immoral, injust and totally unacceptable” following an investigative mission to Santo Domingo
The new CARICOM chairman for the next six months, Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves of St.Vincent and the Grenadines, made it clear last week that there could be no deviation from the stand taken by the CARICOM Bureau on behalf of the Community so long as the DR  fails to revoke  its obnoxious racist-based immigration law that has rendered stateless people born and living in the DR all their lives.
In welcoming Mr Noel as Haiti’s first accredited ambassador to the Community, Secretary General LaRocque, urged that the DR take steps to “right the wrong” resulting from the constitutional court’s ruling on nationality, a judgment that, he noted, retroactively stripped tens of thousands of nationals of Haitian descent and, consequently, rendered them “stateless”.
CARICOM has more than a moral obligation to stay firm in its support with Haiti and the EU itself may need to publicly state its position, in the context of CARICOM/EU relations, if its reported “quiet  diplomacy” fails to have the required effect.