In the last two Torn Identity blogs I looked at citizenship and statelessness through the prism of occupation, with Western Sahara as a case study. Recent events in Ukraine, and the earlier occupation of the Crimea and Donbas regions, demonstrate that the use of citizenship as a tool of occupation, through what has been called ‘passportisation’, remains a live issue …
This series started with a blog on the unusual case of a man from Western Sahara, a Sahrawi, begging a French court to treat him as stateless. The applicant argued that the occupying power in parts of Western Sahara – Morocco – imposed Moroccan nationality on him in violation of international law. Was he right? In the second blog in …
