Nauru document photos online

Imagine a passport so loosely guarded that two men arrested in Malaysia in 2003 were carrying Nauruan documents and accused of links to al-Qaeda. That scandal forced this 21-square-kilometre Pacific republic, the world's smallest, to scrap a 1990s scheme that sold passports and offshore banking to almost anyone. Two decades later Nauru is back in the citizenship business, this time offering a passport for around US$105,000 to fund relocating its population from rising seas. Few nations show so vividly how identity documents can become both a lifeline and a liability for an entire country.

• Passport scandal Nauru's 1990s passport-and-offshore-banking scheme collapsed after men carrying Nauruan passports were tied to al-Qaeda, and in February 2003 the president signed an order shutting the program down under US pressure.
• Golden passport Nauru relaunched citizenship-by-investment in 2024-2025 at around US$105,000 with no residency requirement, explicitly to raise money for relocating its people away from rising seas.
• Passport power Despite its turbulent document history, the Nauruan passport ranked 59th on the Henley Passport Index in September 2025, granting visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 86 countries and territories.
• No capital Nauru is one of the only sovereign states with no official capital city; the Yaren District merely hosts Parliament House and is treated as the de facto seat of government.
• Currency Nauru issues no money of its own and uses the Australian dollar, so the documents in a Nauruan wallet are printed in Canberra, not Yaren.
• Phosphate riches Bird-droppings deposited over millennia made Nauru a phosphate treasure: by 1975 its GDP per capita rivalled the world's highest, reportedly near US$50,000, second only to Saudi Arabia.
• Stripped land Decades of phosphate mining gutted about 80 percent of the island's surface into jagged limestone pinnacles, and the reserves are now almost entirely depleted.
• Smallest republic At just 21 square kilometres, Nauru is the world's third-smallest country and the smallest island nation, with a population of only about 12,025 in 2025.
• No army Independent since 1968, Nauru has never formed a standing military, relying on its police force internally and an informal defence arrangement with Australia.