S TAT E L E S S B Y D E C R E E While there may be legal or other shortcomings relating to a small fraction of the marriages, Decree Law 116/2024ʼs removal of citizenship from this group alone represents a significant ethnopolitical act: a May 2025 report stated that within less than two years, “Official figures show that at least 26,000 women have lost their nationality under the new policy...” 94 Thousands of those denaturalised were born in or spent the better part of their lives in Kuwait, have no effective link with any other country, or whose children and grandchildren were born and raised in Kuwait and know only Kuwait. “Overnight, I became stateless.” AMAL , A B U S IN E S S W O M A N W H O H A D H E L D K U W A IT I C IT IZE N S H IP F O R N E A R LY 20 Y E ARS One account states: Lama (pseudonym), originally from Jordan, discovered she was no longer Kuwaiti when she attempted to pay for a fitness session in Kuwait City: her credit card had been blocked and her bank account frozen. The 50-year-old, who had lived in Kuwait for many years, later learned that her citizenship—granted through marriage—had been revoked. Sharing her story, she said she was ʻin shock: being a law-abiding citizen for 23 years and then waking up one day to find you're not anymore is simply unacceptableʼ.” 95 Since the pre-existing law required women to surrender their previous nationality, anecdotal evidence indicates that a strong majority of the women did exactly that. The sudden, retroactive loss of citizenship forced women into a legal limbo or statelessness. In August 2025, the “Interior Ministry ordered the affected women to issue original documents, long discarded under official orders, from the 1970s and 1980s to prove their former citizenship.” 96 Some of the states involved did not readily have the means to provide the impacted women with documentation, including the United Kingdom (in reportedly two cases) since the states from which they originated may not have had clear legal processes for the situation into which the GoK placed the women or those states. The affected women became invisible overnight. 97 A May 2025 report echoed the situation, quoting: “Amal, a businesswoman who had held Kuwaiti citizenship for nearly 20 years: “Overnight,” she remarked, “I became stateless.” 98 L AY L A — F O R M E R L Y A C I T I Z E N O F S A U D I A R A B I A , N AT U R A L I S E D IN 2 0 0 4 Layla (pseudonym), a former citizen of Saudi Arabia, naturalised in 2004, was formerly married to a naturalised Kuwaiti citizen. She told SALAM DHR that the authorities instructed her to “regain Saudi nationality [in order] to be treated like a Kuwaiti” but the government of Saudi Arabia refused (at the time of writing) to reinstate her nationality, saying Kuwait is responsible. She added that only divorced or widowed women who return to Saudi Arabia and live there for at least two years can re-apply. Layla told SALAM DHR that she felt “systematically targeted” as a naturalised woman and that the absence of a clear route to any nationality; family and life rooted in Kuwait exposed her to blackmail and threats. She said that she had “no rights left” and faced severe legal and economic insecurity, risk of statelessness and forced displacement. 38