Vanuatu’s Top Court Rules CBI Citizens Can Never Vote, Even After Losing Original Nationality

Vanuatu’s Court of Appeal, the country’s highest court, has ruled that citizens who obtained their passports through the country’s citizenship by investment program, officially the Development Support Programme (DSP), are considered “dual citizens” under the Constitution, and therefore barred from voting, even if they lose their original nationality.

The judgment, delivered on August 14th, dismissed an appeal by Sunaraparipooranan Pakshirajan, an Indian-born investor who acquired Vanuatu citizenship through the DSP in August 2021.

His predicament arose from the collision of two legal systems. Indian law automatically terminates Indian citizenship the moment a person voluntarily acquires another nationality, so the grant of his Vanuatu passport extinguished his Indian one by operation of law.

Left holding a single citizenship, Pakshirajan applied to register as a voter in Vanuatu. Electoral authorities refused on the basis that he remained a dual citizen for the purposes of the Constitution, which restricts dual citizens from voting, holding public office, and participating in local politics.

Once a Dual Citizen, Always a Dual Citizen

Before the Supreme Court, Pakshirajan argued that a man with one citizenship cannot be considered a dual citizen, and that the refusal amounted to discriminatory treatment in breach of the Constitution. Chief Justice Vincent Lunabek struck out the petition in February, and a seven-judge Court of Appeal has now definitively rejected the argument.

Dual-citizen status, the appellate bench held, attaches when citizenship is granted through the citizenship by investment pathway. Any subsequent loss of the foreign nationality “does not affect his status as a dual citizen,” the Court found, and creates no fourth category of citizenship alongside the three the Constitution recognizes: indigenous, naturalized, and dual.

The Constitution reserves national sovereignty to the “people of Vanuatu,” defined for that purpose as indigenous and naturalized citizens only. “Naturalized” here refers to the Constitution’s standard pathway, which requires applicants to complete ten years of continuous residence, not to citizenship acquired through the dual-citizenship route that houses the DSP.

Investor citizens sit in a third, separate category, and the Court confirmed that no amount of subsequent circumstance moves them out of it.

“They Didn’t Want External Influence in Their Elections”

Glen Craig of Vanuatu-based Pacific Advisory agrees with the ruling: “Under the Constitution, Vanuatu citizenship passes on every benefit of a citizen except the ability to vote.”

For Craig, the drafters’ logic was arithmetic. Anticipating that a decade of the program would produce a substantial cohort of new citizens, “they didn’t want external influence in their elections. The average parliamentarian in Vanuatu gets elected with around a thousand votes,” he adds.

Thus, a coordinated bloc of investor citizens, in his telling, “could offer undue influence over elections” in constituencies that small.

Also, he is unsparing on the litigant himself: given that Indian law’s single-citizenship rule is well known, “he knew the rules when he applied. It seems a bit of a non-event to go to court to try to change what he knew already.”

The constitutional limitations as they stand, Craig argues, strike “the perfect balance” between delivering the program’s benefits to the public and keeping outside actors away from a small electorate’s politics.

Pakshirajan’s position is precisely that he is not an outside actor. According to official records of the case, he told the Supreme Court at the first hearing of his voting petition that he holds doctoral-level qualifications, has more than 30 years of international, diplomatic, business, and public sector experience, and has contributed to Vanuatu through government service and philanthropy, including establishing the first hemodialysis unit at Vila Central Hospital.

Yet the Constitution, the Court of Appeal held, looks to how citizenship was acquired rather than to what a citizen has done since.

Not His First Courtroom Battle

The voting case is at least Pakshirajan’s second unsuccessful challenge against the state in roughly a year. In 2025, he sought judicial review of the Foreign Service Board’s recruitment process for Vanuatu’s next High Commissioner to India, a post he had himself applied for, alleging the Board acted unlawfully when it re-advertised the position and declined to shortlist him in the second round.

The Supreme Court struck out that claim in June 2025 as premature and an abuse of process. Two months later, the Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal, finding the Board’s process lawful and reasonable.

Craig connects that earlier litigation to the current one, a reading the court record supports: “As I understand it, that particular case relates to an Indian national that obtained Vanuatu citizenship and was intent on becoming a diplomat for Vanuatu, which is only available to naturalized or indigenous citizens.”

The restrictions reach public office as well as the ballot, meaning the same dual-citizen status now confirmed on appeal stands between any DSP citizen and a diplomatic appointment.

Voting Rights Elsewhere in the CBI Market

Vanuatu’s approach is the bluntest in the CBI market: a constitutional category that excludes investor citizens from political life outright and, as of this ruling, permanently. Every other major CBI jurisdiction handles the question differently, and the differences fall into four models.

Turkey draws no line at all. Its Constitution gives every citizen over 18 the right to vote, with no distinction between citizenship acquired by birth, by residence, or by investment.

Egypt imposes a waiting period. Under its Nationality Law, a naturalized citizen may not exercise political rights for five years after acquiring nationality, and may not be elected or appointed to a parliamentary body for ten, though a presidential decree can waive either period.

Jordan restricts office rather than the ballot. Its Nationality Law deems a naturalized person “Jordanian in every respect” but bars him from political and diplomatic posts and from the National Assembly for ten years, and from municipal councils for five; the vote itself carries no waiting period.

Malta and the Caribbean programs tie the vote to actual residency. Malta’s Constitution permits registration only for citizens aged 18 or over who have been resident in Malta for six months out of the preceding 18, while in Antigua & Barbuda the Representation of the People Act requires citizenship, age 18, and six months’ residence in the constituency; the other Eastern Caribbean CBI states apply comparable residence-based registration rules.

The result is a spectrum. In Turkey, the investor votes immediately; in Malta and the Caribbean, after six months of actual residence; and in Egypt, after five years. Vanuatu alone shuts the door for good, however long he stays and whatever nationality he loses along the way.