Spain Votes to Recognize the Sahrawis It Once Counted

Spain’s lower house voted 168-31 on Thursday, with 145 abstentions, to offer Spanish nationality through naturalisation to Sahrawis born before September 29, 1977, and to their children even if they have never lived in Spain. The measure now goes to the Senate. Sahrawi groups estimate that 70,000 to 120,000 people could benefit, although no authoritative count has been established.

The reported tally shows substantial parliamentary assent, but the available account does not provide a party-by-party roll call or the administrative rules that would govern applications. It does not specify a filing period, fees, acceptable substitutes for birth certificates, or an appeal process. Those omissions are not clerical trivia. They describe the distance between a symbolic vote and a usable right.

The files left by withdrawal

Western Sahara was a Spanish colony until 1975, when Spain relinquished its administration under agreements with Morocco and Mauritania. Morocco later asserted control over most of the territory, while the Polisario Front pursued an independent Sahrawi state. Many Sahrawis now live in refugee camps around Tindouf in Algeria, in Western Sahara, or elsewhere abroad. Families and records have consequently traveled along different routes.

The bill makes Spain’s colonial calendar do two jobs at once. It identifies people whom the former administration once placed within its jurisdiction, then asks those people to prove that relationship decades after Spain departed. A register can be an instrument of rule and, much later, a narrow bridge back to recognition.

That bridge will fail where civil books are damaged, inaccessible, inconsistently transcribed, or held by institutions that disagree about names and descent. Applicants may have Spanish-era certificates, later Moroccan documents, camp records, family books, or testimony that uses different spellings and dates. The relevant question is not whether documentary proof should exist. It is whether Spain will accept responsibility for reconciling the documentary world its withdrawal helped fracture.

The Senate should therefore clarify who holds the surviving registers, which certified copies and alternative evidence will count, how children establish descent, and where applicants can challenge a conflict without traveling repeatedly between states. It should also require a public account of approvals and refusals without exposing personal files. Citizenship delayed by half a century should not depend on a pristine archive that history gave few families reason to expect.