S TAT E L E S S B Y D E C R E E Intergenerational Injustice - Punishing Descendents The December 2024 amendments forming part of Decree 116/2024 retained, amongst other features, Articles 1.1 and 5 whereby the GoK may grant nationality to “Any person who has rendered valuable services to Kuwait.” Despite this, the government has revoked the nationality of thousands of people to whom previous governments granted citizenship, including in previous decades. The retroactive application of citizenship revocation provided for in Decree 116/2024 is a statelessness multiplier of the GoKʼs policies and a key new feature of law. It is provided for in Article 13, clauses 1,4 and 5.107 The GoK has deployed this feature of the law: depriving entire patrilineal blood lines of citizenship, including adult children, grandchildren and family groups of citizenship. In single and multigenerational families, thousands of those impacted can reasonably be expected to have no effective or meaningful connection with any other country save Kuwait. Additionally, the GoK uses this feature to impose massive costs on those impacted, requiring them, in principle, to repay all benefits they may have derived since the acquisition of nationality. Our organisations do not have information on this aspect of the amended lawʼs implementation but anecdotal evidence suggests that the provision may be more of a symbolic, rhetorical threat than the kind of act that a government can pursue. The ramifications are difficult to quantify: GCHR cites the case of Moeedh Mohammed al-Ajmi and his family: a 75-year-old retired Kuwaiti citizen who: “[S]elflessly served his country for over 20 years in the military. He is the father of several Kuwaiti men and women and the grandfather of several grandchildren. He was humiliatingly arrested while on his way to Friday prayers and forcibly taken to the hospital. He was then forced to undergo a blood test against his will. He was later informed that the blood test allegedly showed that his DNA did not match his fatherʼs. As a result, all of his children and grandchildren, both men and women, were stripped of their citizenship.”108 20+ Years of military service given by Moeedh Mohammed al-Ajmi before the blood test that ended his family’s citizenship. According to a message from 15 August 2025 - name of sender withheld - the GoK stripped the citizenship of a (another) male Kuwaiti, a person whose grandfather arrived in Kuwait in the 1950s and served in the military. In the 1970s, the government granted the grandfather citizenship on the basis of Distinguished Service.109 With the 2025, retroactive annulment of the deceased grandfatherʼs citizenship, the government stripped the nationality of the senderʼs husband, and, as a consequence, that of her children, despite her own Kuwaiti citizenship. She wrote that: “Overnight, they became stateless, with my youngest being only a few months old! This decision has devastated our lives and cast a heavy shadow over our standard of living, our children's education, and their future. My children, who were once Kuwaiti citizens, now face the loss of their basic rights of education and healthcare, living in a state of constant fear and insecurity, at an age when they should be surrounded by safety and stability.” 42