20. Taking note of target 16.9 of the Sustainable Development Goals and the progress made in the State party in registering children before they turn 1 year old and the positive impact of the placement of birth registration outreach workers in priority hospitals, the Committee recommends that the State party:
(a) Continue its efforts to ensure that all children born on its territory are registered immediately and issued, free of charge, with an official birth certificate, especially those living in rural areas, not born in a hospital, from poor households, of adolescent mothers and of foreign parents, particularly babies of Dominican-Haitian couples and Dominican-born babies of Venezuelan descent;
(b) Accelerate efforts to approve the amendment of Act No. 659-44, which eliminates the judicial process for late registration and provides for an electronic civil registry;
(c) Strengthen the Inter-Agency Coordination Committee and ensure the proper implementation of Act No. 4-23 and the Inter-Agency Cooperation Framework Agreement for the Timely and Late Registration of Births in the Dominican Republic;
(d) Ensure that the lack of a birth certificate does not deny children’s access to education.
22. The Committee urges the State party:
(a) To remove legal provisions and administrative practices that prevent the birth registration and access to nationality of children of Haitian descent, including by reviewing articles 3 and 4 of the Naturalization Act of 1948 and the General Migration Act;
(b) To ensure that women are granted equal rights to men to confer Dominican nationality on their children;
(c) To prevent statelessness at birth and statelessness caused by collective deprivation of nationality and ensure that every child has the right to a nationality;
(d) To guarantee that immigrant and Dominican-born children of Haitian descent who are beneficiaries of Act No. 169-14 have the right to acquire nationality by expediting the implementation of that Act and of the National Plan for the Regularization of Foreigners, regularize or restore the nationality of children affected by Constitutional Court judgment 168-13 and provide access to legal documentation to acquire a nationality without discrimination;
(e) To adopt a protocol to extend the migratory status provided for in the normalization plan for Venezuelans to all children born in the State party of parents of Venezuelan nationality, enabling them to access provisional legal documentation and nationality;
(f) To eliminate barriers and guarantee immigrant and Dominican-born children of foreign descent who have no legal documentation equal access to, and full and effective exercise of, all rights, especially the rights to health, education, social protection and protection from violence;
(g) To consider ratifying the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons of 1954 and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness of 1961.