Tiani strips five more exiles of Nigerien nationality, taking the running total to 25

Gen. Abdourahamane Tiani, who has led Niger since the July 2023 coup, signed a decree on 17 September removing the nationality of five Nigeriens living in exile, Human Rights Watch reported from Nairobi on 22 September. Four are named in the organisation’s text: former Prime Minister Ouhoumoudou Mahamadou, and Amadou dit Ange Barou Chekaraou, Oumarou Moussa Ibrahim and Ousmane Abdoul Moumouni, all former advisers to President Mohamed Bazoum, who was ousted in 2023 and whom HRW describes as arbitrarily detained. The fifth is not identified in the passage. The decree draws its authority from a 2024 order establishing a national terrorism database, which HRW characterises — this is the organisation’s assessment, not a court’s — as having overbroad inclusion criteria, inadequate due process and inadequate avenues for redress, and as increasing the risk of statelessness.

The strongest number in the file comes from the state itself. Niger’s press agency, the Agence Nigérienne de Presse, cited by HRW, puts the number of people provisionally deprived of Nigerien nationality under the 2024 order at 25. The series runs from nine people linked to Bazoum in October 2024, through the June 2026 revocation of the citizenship of exiled opposition figure Mariama Djibrine — accused by authorities of disseminating “information likely to disturb public order, inciting revolt, and colluding with a foreign power” — to the five of this month. “The Niger junta’s use of a terrorism database to deprive people of their nationality without any meaningful legal safeguards raises serious human rights concerns,” said Ilaria Allegrozzi, HRW’s senior Sahel researcher.

Two exile coalitions have contested the decree’s legality. The Alliance of Sahel Democrats — a grouping of Nigerien, Malian and Burkinabè diaspora opposition parties, launched in Belgium in May 2026 and chaired by Djibrine, which advocates a return to constitutional rule — said in an 18 September statement that the decree strips nationality from people still being prosecuted, whereas the 2024 order permits deprivation only after conviction. That is a procedural claim by an interested party. On 19 September the G25-Niger, a coalition of civil society and media organisations formed in 2025, said the order is being used as a tool of political repression against opponents and dissenting voices.

Assessment: Read this as reporting, not as a wire story: it is one organisation’s release, published 22 September and syndicated the same day, with no AFP, Reuters or AP match. The facts are almost certainly right; the framing is HRW’s and should be labelled as such. What makes the file matter is the instrument. A counter-terrorism registry, built by decree, has become an administrative machine for producing statelessness — no trial, no conviction, no appeal that the exiles can reach. That is cheaper than prosecution and harder to reverse. Note also who is being erased: a former prime minister and Bazoum’s advisers, the personnel of the government the junta replaced. The tally of 25 is the number worth watching, and it is the junta’s own.