Juliana Deguis

In 2008, she went to the identification office with her birth certificate to request a Cédula de Identidad y Electoral, an Identification card. That ID card also serves as voter’s registration card . The officers seized her birth certificate and refused to issue her the requested document. The reason given for the rejection was that she had Haitian surnames. She appealed before the Civil and Commercial Court of the First Instance of the Judicial District of Monte Plata. She was rejected. The court justified rejecting her appeal on the basis that she did not supply the original version of her birth certificate but provided photocopies instead. She then appealed to the highest judicial instance in the Dominican Republic, The Constitutional Court.

Juliana Deguis Pierre (born April 1, 1984) is a Haitian-Dominican woman, who was the plaintiff in the landmark Dominican lawsuit against the civil registry authority of the Dominican Republic which ruled that people born to illegal parents never had any right to the Dominican citizenship by birth. Deguis applied to the Special Naturalization Amnesty (Law 169-14) and on August 1, 2014 she acquired the Dominican Republic citizenship.

Juliana Dequis Pierre was born in the Dominican Republic in the batey of Los Jovillos, municipality of Yamasá, Monte Plata province, on 1 April 1984 to a Haitian father (Blanco Deguis) and mother (Marie Pierre) who settled in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s.