Suzan El Tahhan Bidoons: A Statelessness Plight in Kuwait ‫مجلة الدراسات القانونية واالقتصادية‬ large numbers of persons to register as nationals when the 1959 Nationality Law was introduced.13 However, the problem mainly started with the changing of demography. “Kuwait's population is aging. Outside the cosmopolitan Kuwait City, half of Kuwait's population now comes from the more conservative countryside”. Many of the so-called Bedouins14 have roots in Saudi Arabia's tribal and religiously conservative interior. The Bedouin population was growing fast given their higher birth rates. Kuwaiti authorities have reduced Bedouin influence by cracking down on Saudis acquiring Kuwaiti citizenship, sometimes stripping Kuwaiti citizenship from those holding Saudi passports.15 The problem is also linked to the government being suspicious of the ancestors of the stateless population. The authorities suspected that they destroyed their original, non-Kuwaiti passports to claim statelessness fraudulently.16 In 1959, in preparation for achieving complete independence from Britain, Kuwait issued Law No.15 governing Kuwaiti nationality. When the government started to register all residents of Kuwait, besides identifying those eligible for nationality, many of the outskirts’ residents– mainly of Bedouin ethnicity – either did not care enough to go for registering their citizenship claims or did not know 13 UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), The situation of stateless persons in the Middle East and North Africa, October 2010, P.23, available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/4cea28072.html [accessed 19 December 2015]. 14 There’s a differentiate between Bidoons and Bedouin: “The Bidoons, or stateless persons, whose status is a politically sensitive issue, are composed mainly of Arabs, most of whom would be classified ethnically as Beduins (Nomadics).” cited at; NASRA M SHAH, MAKHDOOM A SHAH, AND JAAFAR BEHBEHANI, Health Policy and Planning (Impact Factor: 3.47), Department of Community Medicine and Behavioral Sciences, Kuwait University, 09/1996; DOI: 10.1093/heapol/11.3.319, Source: PubMed, Research Reprt: Ethnicity, nationality and health care accessibility in Kuwait: a study of hospital emergency room users, available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/13138473_Ethnicity_nationality_and_health_care_accessibility_in_Kuwai t_A_study_of_hospital_emergency_room_users 15 Michael Rubin, “Has Kuwait Reached the Sectarian Tipping Point?”, American enterprise institute for public policy research, vol. No. 4, August 2013, available at: https://www.aei.org/publication/has-kuwait-reached-thesectarian-tipping-point/ 16 Ibid 9