Spain’s Congress of Deputies will vote on September 10 on a bill that would grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawis born in the Sahara (south of Morocco) while the territory was under Spanish administration, before its transfer in 1975.
The bill, proposed by the Sumar parliamentary group, would grant citizenship through special naturalization to people born in the territory before September 29, 1977, as well as to the direct descendants of such individuals. These descendants would have five years from the date of their parent’s naturalization to apply for citizenship. The group estimates, according to Spanish media outlet Capital, that the measure would affect around 80,000 people.
International relations professor Khalid Chiat, who spoke to Assahifa English, questioned the real motivation behind the bill, arguing that the Spanish move appears to be driven more by political objectives than by legal or humanitarian considerations.
“If we consider this Spanish orientation, or even the orientation of a sector of the party factions inside Spain, we are dealing with a population that was colonized, and that colonialism ended definitively over 50 years ago. This immediately raises the question of the purpose of this, the true objective: Is it legal? Is it humanitarian? Is it political?” Chiat said.
“I think we can say that there are no legal or humanitarian goals here, but only political goals of maintaining, at least, the presence of the Moroccan Sahara at the level of the presence of Spain itself. This is an internal card of Spain that can be played in this context,” he added.
Chiat said that no state accepts the collective naturalization of its nationals by another state. “This amounts to an open and obvious violation of the legal status of the person who is under the personal care of his own state, whose behavior is also the responsibility of that state,” he said.
“These attempts to besiege Morocco with this human network could, once the legal crisis at the level of the United Nations and at the level of general legal standing comes to an end, lead to a kind of human burden that Spain will suffer from in the future regardless,” Chiat said. “There is little benefit, over the long run, in having population groups tied to another state residing within Spanish territory. Spain may eventually reconsider this measure, or its consequences for the people concerned and their descendants.”
“This is going to affect Morocco-Spain relations negatively in the short term,” Chiat said. “But it also has long-term consequences, and the longer-term consequences, in years and decades, are likely to be negative for Spain.”
The bill would also separately amend the Spanish Civil Code to add Sahrawis to the list of nationals who are eligible to apply for Spanish naturalization after two years of legal residency. The provision is currently available to people from Ibero-American countries, Andorra, the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Portugal, as well as Sephardic Jews, according to Capital.
Spain had previously provided for a similar one-year period for claims to Sahrawi nationality in 1976. However, Spain had effectively already withdrawn from the territory, rendering the provision largely academic.
The bill has moved forward amid an unstable political atmosphere in the Spanish parliament. The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) was the only party to vote against allowing the bill to be considered in February 2025 on legal grounds, before later reversing its position and supporting it in committee during the ongoing Ceuta crisis, according to Spanish news agency EFE.
The Popular Party and the Catalan party Junts abstained in committee, while Vox has been the only party to consistently vote against the bill, arguing that it would negatively affect the ordinary process of acquiring Spanish nationality.
Enrique Santiago, spokesman for Izquierda Unida and a Sumar deputy, separately called on the Popular Party and Vox to reconsider their positions in light of the accusations leveled against Morocco over the Ceuta border crossing, arguing that opposing the bill at this point would serve no one's interests other than Rabat. According to Chiat, this further indicates the bill's “political nature.”
It is worth noting that following Spain’s withdrawal from the territory in 1975, the legal status of Sahrawis who held Spanish administrative documents, attended Spanish schools, and served in Spanish institutions remained unresolved.
The Spanish Supreme Court has ruled on the issue on several occasions since then, reaching varying conclusions. In 1998 and 1999, it ruled in favor of granting Spanish nationality to two Sahrawi individuals, while in 2020 it determined that the Sahara could not be considered Spanish territory for nationality purposes.
Meanwhile, Abdelhamid Byuki, an expert on Moroccan-Spanish affairs, said in an article published by Assahifa Arabic that a Spanish court ruling issued in February 2026 affirmed that people born in the territory during the colonial period were not considered Spanish nationals by birth. This represents a legal gap that the current bill seeks to address through this specific route.
