ARTICLE - NATIONALITY COMMISSION

UPDATE ON THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY ON THE ISSUE OF NATIONALITIES
(Haiti Libre) -

The Special Commission responsible for investigating the nationality of members of the Government, which is presided by Senator Joseph Lambert, and whose Youri Latortue is the Recording Secretary, [2 Senators very close to the Head of State] have started the verification of documents for the persons concerned. According to Senator Steven Benoît, 39 political figures are concerned in the investigation of the Commission.

Senator Moïse Jean-Charles who has been accusing for several weeks that President Martelly, Prime Minister Garry Conille, Chancellor Laurent Lamothe, the Minister of Tourism, Stéphanie Balmir Villedrouin, and the Secretary of State for the Interior, Georges Racine, and another Minister that he had promised to reveal the name without doing so... he invokes for this latter person, the unavailability of a landmark document as justifying his refusal to disclose the identity of the person.

He said he provided information of elements and evidence on the steps in obtaining foreign residence for Michel Martelly and his foreign nationalities. Senator Benoît only confirms that "[...] Senator Moïse Jean Charles submitted a document, that gives us two passport numbers; .... one in principle is supposed, .... we say supposed, because we have no the certainty of the information, as being a U.S. passport. The other is supposed to be an Italian passport. Immigration can not tell us whether they are American and Italian passports [or to whom they belong]. Therefore, we are obliged to make approaches through the embassies and international organizations... it takes more time, but the process has been started..."

On Monday, January 16, the Commission began its investigation at the institutions and went to the immigration office. Steven Benoît declared on Wednesday, "...during these three days, we examined the documents of 37 of 39 people. There are two that are not entered in the documents for the reason that they have fairly common names, and there is a Secretary of State for example, whose name appears 26 times. We do not want to be mislead about their identity [...] That's why we have asked to have the passports to be sure of the birth certificates, [...] for when we will submit our report, we do not want to hear that we are wrong about the identity.

After passport controls, we will also examine boarding passes that are very important [...] it is a very meticulous work. We have started collecting the data but we have not finished [.. .] because these are Ministers and the Secretary of State who travel a lot, there are some who during the last 10 years had at least 15 passports [...] imagine the amount of boarding cards that they filled in a year [...] remember that the President as a musician is a person who traveled almost every weekend. The Foreign Minister has traveled almost every week [...] so it will take time to collect all the boarding passes, but by the end of the week we hope to have all the data."

According to Senator Benoît, 22 of 39 cases have been studied, stating that the report could be completed by this weekend or early next week.