Spain’s National Court denied citizenship to a Moroccan woman on grounds that members of her family have engaged in jihadist activities, some of whom had also unsuccessfully attempted to become Spanish nationals in recent years.
The court determined that the woman’s ties to individuals with a history of engaging in radical Islamism make her a potential threat to Spain’s national security and found granting citizenship would jeopardize public order and national interests.
The ruling came in response to a court proceeding started by the woman, who claimed that she complied with all of the requirements to obtain Spanish citizenship by naturalization, and that she had been denied it under alleged “baseless and spurious” grounds. The court not only denied her request, but it also ordered her to pay the costs incurred by the proceedings.
Neither the court, nor Spanish outlets have publicly disclosed the name of the Moroccan woman at time of publication.
The National Court ruling against the unidentified Moroccan woman comes at a time when the government of Spanish socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is conducting a widely-criticized mass amnesty process that will grant half a million illegal migrants in Spain with legal residence status and work permits.
The Spanish newspaper El País reported on Thursday that it obtained a copy of the corresponding court ruling, in which three magistrates of Spain’s National Court detail that the woman submitted an application to receive Spanish citizenship on June 27, 2024. The judges noted that while the unidentified woman met Spain’s “legal and continuous residence” requirements to apply for citizenship, the Spanish Justice Ministry found that the woman lacked a both good civic conduct and a “sufficient degree of integration into Spanish society.”
The Moroccan woman’s father was arrested by Spanish police officers in June 2016 for spreading pro-ISIS propaganda, an act that “demonstrated his identification with, support for, and affinity toward the ideology” of the Islamic State. The man was reportedly deported from Spain in 2023, and was handed a ten-year ban from returning to the country.
According to El País, the man and his wife had also attempted to attain Spanish citizenship before he was arrested and expelled.
The court order reveals that other members of the Moroccan woman’s family also hold ties to Islamic jihadism. Her husband, only identified by El País as a man of “Spanish origin who converted to Islam,” had been arrested by Spanish Civil Guard officials in March 2018 in a joint operation with the National Intelligence Centre (CNI) and was charged with self-indoctrination with the intention of joining the ranks of a terrorist organization.
He was ultimately acquitted due to a lack of evidence. After he left prison, the husband moved in with the Moroccan woman to the city of Valencia.
In spite of that reports cited in the court order revealed that the husband engaged in contact with other individuals accused of Jihadism during his temporarily detention at the Villabona Penitentiary Center in Asturias. The reports further stated that it was during that time that the woman’s husband and father met, and during which an arranged marriage was “probably” agreed upon, with Spanish police officers describing this as a “common practice among Salafist and/or jihadist groups in seeking arranged marriages with individuals who share their ideology.”
“The correspondence that was seized from [the woman’s husband] also suggests that his time in prison served to strengthen his ideology,” the cited report read, and noted that the man is currently under “special surveillance” by the Civil Guard due to suspicions that he remains radicalized by Islamic jihadism.