Spanish Congress votes to restore nationality to Sahrawis born before 1977

Spain's Congress approved a bill on Thursday that would grant Spanish nationality to Sahrawis born before 29 September 1977, when Madrid still administered Western Sahara, and to their children. The vote was 168 in favour, 31 against and 145 abstentions. The text now goes to the Senate.

The ruling Socialists and their junior partner Sumar backed the law. Sumar filed the original proposal. The conservative People's Party abstained. Vox voted no. Tesh Sidi, a Sumar deputy and the first woman of Sahrawi origin in the Cortes, told the chamber the state was restoring the Spanish national identity card to those Sahrawis who once held it and from whom this state took it away.

Western Sahara was a Spanish colony from 1884 until 1976. Spain withdrew under the 1975 Madrid Accords with Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco now controls most of the territory. The Polisario Front holds a strip in the east and runs refugee camps around Tindouf in Algeria. A U.N. referendum on self-determination was never held. People born under Spanish administration lost a status that other former colonial subjects, including many Latin Americans, kept a path back to.

The bill uses carta de naturaleza, a grant of nationality by law rather than by long residence. Applicants need not live in Spain. Proof can include an expired Spanish identity card, a receipt from the U.N. referendum census, a legalised birth certificate, a family book, a driving licence, a pension record or other papers issued by the Spanish administration. Children of those registered would have five years after a parent's inscription to apply. A separate track shortens the ordinary residence route for Sahrawis who do live in Spain from ten years to two, the same period that applies to most Latin American nationals, Sephardic Jews, and citizens of the Philippines, Equatorial Guinea and Portugal.

Estimates of who might qualify run from about 70,000 to 120,000 people, including first-generation descendants. Tesh Sidi has put the camp population who could benefit at around 50,000 and has said not all will apply. Mohamed Mohamedna, who spoke to Al Jazeera after the vote, said he hoped to apply for a Spanish passport.

The timing is awkward for Madrid's relationship with Rabat. In July more than 70,000 people crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. Morocco is Spain's counterpart on migration, trade and the status of the Sahara. A nationality law that treats Sahrawis as former Spanish subjects cuts across Morocco's claim that the territory is its southern provinces. The People's Party's abstention kept the bill alive without forcing the main opposition to own a fight with Rabat.

Spain controlled the territory under several legal titles. The people who held a Spanish identity card there were documented by the same state that later signed them away. The bill's drafters treat that sequence as an unfinished administrative act. Morocco treats any Spanish document issued for the Sahara as a political claim. Both readings can be true at once. Only one of them will decide whether a passport is printed.

The Senate can still amend or delay the text. Until it votes, no passport will be printed. What the Congress did is set a legal definition: a person born in the colony before late 1977 is, for nationality purposes, someone Spain once documented and then dropped. The documents that survive in drawers in Tindouf, Laayoune and Madrid will decide how many of those people become Spanish again.

If the Senate passes the bill in the same form, the Ministry of Justice will have to process claims on paper and through its electronic office. The first test will be whether expired identity cards and U.N. census receipts are accepted at the volume the estimates imply. That is an administrative problem. The political problem sits next door, in a relationship with Morocco that already has a migration crisis on the books.