S TAT E L E S S B Y D E C R E E In April 2021, however, the Court of Cassation reportedly made a decision analogous to the March 2016 ruling. 68 The importance of these two cases appears to be, at least prior to the passage of 2024 nationality legislation that it provides for the retroactive revocation of nationality. For example, a long-since grandparent may be deemed to have obtained nationality fraudulently and, as a consequence, dozens of his descendants born Kuwaiti, including minors, face the punitive revocation of their nationality. Kuwaitʼs current Minister of Interior and Chair of the Supreme Committee for Citizenship Review, Fahad al-Yousef al-Sabah stated: “Granting nationality is a sovereign matter as ruled by the Constitutional Court, and I do not believe that any level of the judiciary has the authority to review it.” 69 It is perhaps on account of the climate that the GoK created that Zahra - a pseudonym for a person who provided testimony - was (in her words) “blocked” from hiring a lawyer (see below). Scope and operation of citizenship revocations in 2024-2025 TEXT BOX 4 Operationalisation of citizenship for political outcomes The GoK has previously operationalised citizenship for political outcomes. In 2015, Kuwait human rights and political activists told a member drafters of this report report that “revocation of citizenship is an even more severe punishment than imprisonment, since the government also strips the nationality of dependents of adult males whose citizenship has been revoked.”70 In July 2014, the government revoked the citizenship of two men seen as opposing the government, Ahmed al-Jabr (al-Shammari), owner of the al-Youm media platform, critical of the government, and Abdullah Barghash, a former parliamentarian, along with his two brothers, his sister and their dependents.71 The GoK took this step as a part of an “iron fist policy” to quell socio-political unrest relating to the arrest of a prominent political figure. Prior to the authoritiesʼ revocation of his nationality, Abdullah al-Barghash had frequently criticized the government on Twitter [now X] and during media interviews, accusing it of corruption in June 2014 and urging people to reject the arbitrariness of the Interior Ministry.72 On 29 September 2014, the authorities revoked the citizenship of Saʼad al-ʻAjmi, a political activist born in Kuwait. The spokesperson for the Popular Action Movement, opposed to the (then) government, on 22 April 2015, the GoK expelled him to Saudi Arabia, asserting that he was not a Kuwaiti citizen. While able to challenge the process in lower courts, on 12 October 2015, an Appeal Court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction as it was a sovereign matter (see Legal Framework). The GoK used, in 2014, pre-existing provisions in the Nationality Law to revoke the nationality of those alleged of, amongst other things, trying to "undermine the stability" of the state. The GoK stripped the citizenship of 57 individuals from the al-Barghash family. As in all such cases, the decision stripped the impacted family members of state benefits, including public healthcare, education and housing. 31