Kuwait Bulk-Orders Comoros Citizenship for Stateless Bidoon

Citizenship for sale schemes have become an increasingly common phenomenon as the rich from non-Western states look to upgrade their travel privileges. The likes of Malta, Cyprus, and St. Kitts have had some success selling citizenship to plutocrats from Russia, China and other non-visa waiver countries. The revenues supply a nice fiscal bump at low marginal cost to these small states. The price is fairly steep (more than a million Euros in the case of Schengen-advantaged Malta) but the number of buyers has been relatively small.

That’s cash-for-passports on a retail basis. We now have reports of the first wholesale purchase. Kuwait has long been criticized for its refusal to extend Kuwaiti citizenship to native-born tribal Bidoon, who as a result have been left stateless. (See this report from Human Rights Watch, for example.) Kuwait continues to deny the Bidoon Kuwaiti citizenship. But it is now moving to procure them citizenship in the Comoros. Kuwait purports to solve the statelessness problem. The Comoros (not a rich country) gets a couple of hundred million dollars for the favor.

Full report here from Atossa Abrahamian in Aljazeera America. Those Bidoon who accept Comoros citizenship will no longer be stateless, which will better their lot in place in Kuwait for things like health care. But human rights groups aren’t buying. The Comoros scheme will continue to deny the Bidoon access to citizenship in their place of habitual residence. That’s problematic as a matter of international human rights, which is beginning to assimilate an “access to citizenship” norm beyond the long-established regime against statelessness.

The transaction itself is probably consistent with international law. States have near-complete discretion with respect to the extension of citizenship. If the Comoros wants to sell nationality on a bulk basis to a group of people that have no ties to the Comoros, that’s its business, at least to the extent that the Comoros doesn’t try to assert the nominal nationality against other states (which would bring the ICJ’s Nottebohm threshold of “genuine links” into play). That’s highly unlikely, since the Comoros won’t have much interest in expending diplomatic resources on behalf of citizens with whom it has no organic social connection.

So the deal is likely to stick. It might even serve as a template for other states that host large stateless populations. Hard to argue that this doesn’t supply further evidence of citizenship’s degradation, but there’s not much to do about it.