WOODING, BRIDGET
Director @ Observatory Caribbean Migranta (OBMICA)
Bio
Bridget Wooding is a researcher, advocate, writer, trainer, and expert witness on migration, statelessness and related issues. She has coordinated the Caribbean Migration and Development Observatory (OBMICA), based in Santo Domingo (www.obmica.org), since its inception in 2009. She is the author of numerous publications, including books and articles on nationality matters and the migration dynamics affecting the Dominican Republic, the island of Hispaniola, the insular Caribbean, and respective diasporas. In 2013, she delivered an expert witness testimony in the case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v. Dominican Republic, which led to significant jurisprudence on the right to nationality for Dominicans of foreign ancestry (IACtHR 2014).
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Panel(s)
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Presentation(s)
- Summary: In June 2022, the Dominican Republic (DR) presented its candidacy to occupy a seat on the UN Council of Human Rights (2024-2026). In the country this was met with incredulousness because increasingly restrictive migration policies are having dire effects on Haitian labour migrants and their families. Dominican civil society has no doubts that the country is going from bad to worse on its human rights record and it is well-known that the Dominican Republic is the single largest case of statelessness in Latin America and the Caribbean. Taking our cue from Gina Athena Ulysse’s Why Haiti Needs New Narratives (2015), this paper will insist that, in order to inform activism, policy, and the ability to imagine a different future, new narratives are needed for the entire island of Hispaniola, in particular for the predicament of Haitian migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic.