In the midst of our domestic distraction with Obamacare and the destructive and just-ended federal government shutdown, we are in the midst of a global human-rights tragedy endangering hundreds of thousands of individuals but that has gone virtually unnoticed.

The highest court of the Dominican Republic recently decided to ignore hundreds of years of Western constructions of citizenship law, which provides that citizenship is granted to offspring of citizens or to those born in a country. Specifically, the court ruled to deny the Dominican nationality to children of undocumented immigrants, despite the fact that these children were born in the Dominican Republic.

The victims of this unwise decision meet both hallmarks of citizenship — they were born in the Dominican Republic and were born of Dominican parents (albeit of Haitian descent). To add insult to this legally absurd injury, the Dominican court decided to strip the citizenship of generations of Dominicans of Haitian descent dating back to 1929.