Comoros inquiry found its economic citizenship law was never adopted

The Comoros granted citizenship for seven years under a law that a parliamentary commission of inquiry later concluded had never been effectively adopted. Presidential decrees made under Law 08-014/AU of 27 November 2008 on economic citizenship naturalised tens of thousands of people between January 2009 and March 2016. In December 2017 the commission found the vote invalid and called the acts taken under the law by the two presidents concerned “legally null and void”. For anyone who holds a Comorian passport from that period, or is offered one now, that finding is the starting point.

What the law said

The text, as the inquiry reproduced it, described an investment-based route. Article 1 reserved economic citizenship for an adult foreigner with the status of “economic partner of the Government”, acquired by applying to invest a minimum sum over a period to be set by the country’s economic investment programme. The law did not state that sum: it left it to the finance law of the year in which the application was made.

The application went to an Independent National Commission, and Article 2 listed the file:

• a birth certificate, a medical certificate and a criminal record, each less than three months old;
• a marriage certificate where relevant;
• proof from a bank approved in the Comoros that the investment sum had been deposited;
• a Treasury receipt for the fees;
• the investment project itself.

Citizenship was then granted by presidential decree, taken in the Council of Ministers on the commission’s binding opinion and on presentation by the minister of justice (Article 4). Article 9 made any grant that did not bear the words “on the binding opinion of the Commission” null. The rights of spouses and minor children were left to a further decree (Article 7), and any agreement with a state or institution to run the programme needed the Assembly’s approval (Article 12).

A disputed vote

Parliament rejected the bill in July 2008, by 21 of 33 deputies. It returned in November, rewritten and retitled. At the plenary of 27 November the deputies upheld an objection that the text was unconstitutional, by 20 votes of 33, and the Speaker closed the sitting at 19:30. Five minutes later the Deputy Speaker opened a second sitting with 13 deputies holding five proxies, and the government treated that sitting as having adopted the law. It was promulgated by decree 08-138/PR in December 2008; the inquiry dates the decree to the 13th in one passage and to the 16th in two others.

A challenge reached the Constitutional Court, which on 28 May 2009 declared itself without jurisdiction. It noted that the text had been given the same number, 08-014/AU, as the 2008 supplementary finance law.

How it actually ran

The commercial basis was a deal to naturalise about 4,000 families of stateless Gulf residents, known as Bidoun, within two years for US$200 million. Enrolment took place in Abu Dhabi, run by a team under Emirati security officers, with Comorian police taking fingerprints. The inquiry found the file collected there bore little relation to Article 2: it asked for a stateless person’s card and a “security certificate” instead of a criminal record.

The first decree, dated 10 January 2009, naturalised 317 people, 95 of them under the age of ten, and the inquiry found that none of them was an investor. It was signed the same day as the decree creating the Independent National Commission, which the inquiry took as showing that the commission, not yet constituted, could not have given the binding opinion the law required. Across the 44 decrees signed by Presidents Ahmed Abdallah Sambi and Ikililou Dhoinine, the inquiry found only one with a notification of the commission’s opinion attached. That notification’s reference number implied seven earlier deliberations the inquiry could not see, so on its own hypothesis the opinion was sought for only eight of the 44 decrees. None of the decrees was published in the Official Journal, and former ministers testified that the Council of Ministers was not consulted.

Dhoinine alone signed 27 decrees covering about 23,806 people, the last on 14 March 2016. A 2011 accord negotiated in the Emirates set a target of about 5,000 further citizens at 4,600 euros a file, raised from 3,600. The decree on spouses’ and children’s rights was signed only on 3 December 2013; the inquiry noted that its absence had not stopped whole families from being naturalised.

How many passports

The passport-production database recorded 47,950 new requests for ordinary passports and 136 for diplomatic ones between 2008 and 18 October 2017, among them 142 ordinary passports issued in 2008, before the law was promulgated. The inquiry counted 6,039 passports issued outside any presidential decree and read the gap as the work of parallel sales networks. Reuters reported that nearly 48,000 foreigners had received passports, about 6,000 more than officially approved. The database counts requests and Reuters counts recipients, and nothing in these sources says whether either figure removes duplicates. The inquiry also reported, separately, that 560 passports went to stateless people from Kuwait.

How it closed

President Azali Assoumani, in office from 26 May 2016, told the inquiry that the Council of Ministers had decided to stop issuing passports to new applicants and that he had signed no naturalisation decree. Reuters reported sales suspended from May 2016. His government did, however, renew existing passports: the inquiry counted 73 renewals in 2016.

The commission’s recommendations, dated 8 December 2017, went further. If the government still regarded granting citizenship to foreigners as a lever for development, it should repeal the 2008 law and create the legal framework that was missing. It should cancel every ordinary and diplomatic passport put into circulation through what it called “this vast fraud”. As a diplomatic option, it proposed agreeing with the United Arab Emirates a final list of families and granting them an acquired right, which would spare the Comoros from repaying the money the Emirates had released. The Emirati side, for its part, told the inquiry it had paid the full US$200 million, learned only in 2010 that the law had never been voted, and asked that its residents’ files be validated in good faith.

On 2 January 2018 the foreign minister said a forthcoming circular would cancel more than 150 passports. On 28 November 2022 the State Security Court sentenced Sambi to life imprisonment for high treason over the passport sales; its rulings cannot be appealed.

What it means for a holder

The nullity finding is a parliamentary conclusion, not a court judgment. None of the four sources this article draws on records a repeal of Law 08-014/AU or a general cancellation of the passports issued under it. What they record is a stop to new grants, a recommendation to cancel, and a promised circular on more than 150 documents.

These sources do not settle any individual holder’s status. The report does tie two questions to a legal consequence, and the papers of any single grant either answer them or leave them open: whether a presidential decree names the holder at all, given the 6,039 passports the inquiry found with no decree behind them; and whether that decree bears the commission’s binding opinion, the wording Article 9 makes a condition of validity.

A former head of the national security service also testified to the inquiry that the production system allowed one person to hold two or more passports at once. These four sources do not establish whether any offer of Comorian citizenship for money made today is authorised; the last grant they record under this law is dated March 2016.