The sale of citizenship has been on the increase in recent years. Since 2008, the Union of Comoros has practiced the sale of its passports to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait, both of which have large populations of bidoons (stateless). While the bidoons have received the Comoran passports none of them has physically relocated to the island. Rather, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kuwait use the agreement with the Union of Comoros to eliminate the statelessness problem and exclude the bidoons from social welfare benefits that only their citizens enjoy. The forcing of the bidoons to accept Comoran passports has raised serious human rights concerns.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian discusses this issue for the New York Times.
On the topic of the sale of citizenship, also see our Working Paper Should citizenship be for sale? and Jelena Dzankic’s The Pros and Cons of Ius Pecuniae: Investor citizenship in comparative perspective.