ManamaBahrain stripped citizenship from infants by royal decree.
The Interior Ministry said those denationalized had expressed support for Iran’s retaliatory strikes online; no court issued the order — only the king.
Iran’s High Council for Human Rights called the inclusion of children “collective punishment” prohibited by UN monitoring bodies.
Sources: Mehr News Agency
THE TOOL
Citizenship revocation by executive decree — no trial, no appeal — has become a signature instrument of Gulf monarchies. Bahrain has stripped over 1,000 nationals since 2012, mostly Shia activists, clerics, and their family members.
THE DEMOGRAPHIC INVERSION
Bahrain is the only Gulf monarchy where a Sunni royal family rules a Shia-majority population. Roughly 60-70% of citizens are Shia; the Al Khalifa dynasty, in power since 1783, is Sunni. Every political crisis since independence has run along this fault line.
THE 2011 PIVOT
The Pearl Roundabout uprising of February 2011 was crushed when Saudi Arabia sent 1,000 troops across the King Fahd Causeway under the GCC's Peninsula Shield Force. The Pearl monument itself was demolished. Mass denationalizations began the following year — punishment converted into a permanent legal status.
STATELESSNESS AS PUNISHMENT
The 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness forbids stripping nationality if it leaves a person stateless — with a narrow exception for conduct 'seriously prejudicial to vital interests of the State.' Bahrain has not ratified the convention. Most denationalized Bahrainis hold no other passport.
THE CLERICAL TARGET
Shia religious authority in Bahrain runs through marjas (sources of emulation) trained in Najaf or Qom. Stripping clerics of citizenship severs the local hawza from its congregants — and forces exile to Iran or Iraq, which the state then cites as proof of foreign loyalty. The accusation builds the evidence.
THE CHILD QUESTION
Stripping infants — too young to have expressed any view — collapses the legal fiction that revocation punishes individual conduct. It reveals the underlying logic: nationality flows from political loyalty of the family, not birth on the soil. Bahrain follows jus sanguinis through the paternal line, which is why the father's denaturalization can void the child's status retroactively.