Guest Editor's Note/Nota de la Editora Invitada

JUSTICE, NATIONALITY AND MIGRATION ON HISPANIOLAHaiti and the Dominican Republic share the Caribbean island which we today call Hispaniola.But apart from that fact the two neighbours are a world apart, separated by a border that constitutes one of the largest socioeconomic divides between two countries in the world.Historically the two countries have been dominated by different colonial powers, France in the case of Haiti and Spain in the case of the Dominican Republic.Accordingly, they have different colonial legacies; while Haiti was dominated by slavery, which constituted an important asset for colonial France, what came to constitute the Dominican Republic was from the mid 16th century almost forgotten by Spain.The peoples of the two countries are also separated by language, religion, ethnic composition, and by a history of conflict and controversies.Apart from these factors, however, events on Hispaniola during the last five to ten years have generated new challenges in the two countries and in their state-society relationships.The articles of this special issue discuss and analyse these challenges.On September 23, 2013, the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal decided to give the 2010 constitutional reform regarding the rights to Dominican nationality retroactive force back to 1929 (Sentence TC168/13).The 2010 constitutional reform restricted the ius soli clause, the right to Dominican nationality for anyone born on Dominican soil, thus excluding children of undocumented or illegal residents.This highly criticised ruling, which violated several principles of legality, would affect the large minority of Dominicans of Haitian decent disproportionally as more than 200.000 people suddenly risked losing their citizenship as a result of it.The ruling was compared to the German Nazi-regime's policies towards the Jews in the 1930s by Nobel Prize Winner Mario Vargas Llosa in an op-ed in the Spanish daily El País. 1 Sentence 168/13 came three years after the devastating earthquake that struck about 25 kilometres outside the Haitian capital, Port-Au-Prince, on January 12, 2010.The earthquake killed more than 100.000people (the death toll varies tremendously), destroyed large parts of the capital and left

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