The kingdom of Bahrain is threatening to strip citizenship from people found to have jeopardized national security during attacks by Iran during Operation Epic Fury.
The Saudi Gazette reported on Sunday that King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa ordered an “immediate review of cases related to entitlement to Bahraini citizenship,” and instructed that legal measures should be taken against “those accused of betraying the nation or undermining its security and stability.”
“We will immediately begin taking the necessary measures against those who have dared to betray the nation or threaten its security and stability. We will also review who deserves Bahraini citizenship and who does not, so that the necessary procedures can be applied to them,” he said.
King Hamad placed Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa, who is also the prime minister of Bahrain, in charge of the citizenship review, along with a general review of Bahrain’s defense and economic sectors.
Critics of the king’s decree feared that the citizenship review could be politicized, with citizenship revoked for vague reasons without due legal process.
“Reviewing citizenship status or using the right to nationality as a punitive tool based on vague, unregulated accusations such as ‘betraying the nation’ or ‘undermining security’ is not a legitimate sovereign measure. It constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of nationality,” the Geneva-based non-profit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (EMHRM) said on Tuesday.
“The new directives represent a dangerous escalation within the already hardline security approach adopted by Bahraini authorities,” the group added.
EMHRM noted that Bahrain has a “troubling record of stripping citizens of their nationality,” including almost a decade of purges after street protests in 2011, which resulted in about 990 people losing their citizenship.
Citizenship is difficult to obtain in Bahrain, as only male citizens pass the right of citizenship along to their children. If a man is stripped of his citizenship, his children lose theirs as well, even if their mother remains a citizen. Naturalization is a difficult process that requires 15 years of residency for Arabs, and 25 years for non-Arabs.
The constitution of Bahrain explicitly allows the government to rescind citizenship “in case of treason, and such other cases as prescribed by law.”
The citizenship laws were amended in 2014, empowering the Interior Ministry to strip nationality from a citizen who “aids, or is involved in the service of, a hostile state,” or who “causes harm to the interests of the Kingdom or acts in a way that contravenes his duty of loyalty to it.” As EMHRM noted, revocations of citizenship increased considerably after the requirements were loosened.
On the other hand, the Bahrain Defense Force said on Sunday that it intercepted 194 missiles and 523 drones from Iran between February 28 and April 8, and some of Iran’s attacks damaged civilian infrastructure. The onslaught clearly indicated the kingdom has a major security problem with Tehran and its proxies.
Bahrain is a Sunni Muslim monarchy with a restless Shiite population. The Shiites were drivers of the 2011 protest movement, and they expressed sympathy with the Shiite theocracy of Iran during Operation Epic Fury, even as Iran launched unprovoked attacks against Bahrain.
The government of Bahrain cracked down on Shiite activism last month, denouncing the Iran sympathizers as a security risk. Human rights activists sympathetic to the Shiite minority said the crackdown went too far, and some of the detainees were not given due process or proper legal representation.
The National reported on Sunday that Bahrain “has already taken action against more than a dozen people with alleged links to Iran or Hezbollah.”
Fourteen people were charged with spying for Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) last month, with charges including “receiving funds from Iran, leaking state secrets, and, in one case, receiving military training at IRGC camps.”
“In a separate case, three people were accused of collecting funds under the guise of charitable work but transferring them to support Hezbollah,” The National added.
In March, Bahrain’s Public Prosecution service warned citizens and residents not to share “images or footage” of Iran’s attacks or their aftermath, as doing so could threaten national security. The public was warned that defying this edict would be prosecuted as a criminal offense, and circulating banned photos would be treated the same as creating them.