6 • International Journal of Refugee Law, 2026, Vol. 00, Issue 00 ‘Kuwait’s Stateless Offered Comoros Citizenship’ Gulf News <https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/kuwait/ kuwaits-stateless-offered-comoros-citizenship-1.1410104> accessed 5 March 2024; see also Rabuffetti and Wills (n 8). 45 Rabuffetti and Wills (n 8) 83. 46 ibid. 47 Habib Toumi, ‘Kuwait Denies Comoros Citizenship Agreement’ (20 June 2016) <https://gulfnews.com/ world/gulf/kuwait/kuwait-denies-comoros-citizenship-agreement-1.1849101> accessed 21 March 2024 48 Rabuffetti and Wills (n 8) 78. 49 Kuzmova (n 8) 281. 50 Lori (n 8) 3. 51 ibid 205. 52 ibid 3. 53 ibid; Katie Cella, ‘Stateless in Dubai’ (2014) 39 Boston Review 24, 28. 54 Lori (n 8) 206. 55 ibid. 44 Downloaded from academic.oup.com/ijrl/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijrl/eeag028/8767365 by guest on 08 October 2026 announcement that ‘tens of thousands’ of stateless people in Kuwait would be granted ‘special applications for Comoros’ economic citizenship’, with the process to commence following the establishment of a Comorian embassy in Kuwait.44 In exchange, Kuwait would invest in housing and public infrastructure on the island nation.45 The arrangement was justified in similar terms as by the UAE: the grant of foreign passports would regularize the legal status of the bidun in Kuwait and therefore ‘solve’ the problem of their statelessness.46 However, by 2016 the Kuwaiti Government was denying that it had followed in the UAE’s footsteps by agreeing to such a plan.47 Information about what caused the government to change their position is limited;48 scholars have speculated that a high degree of awareness of the rights of the bidun in Kuwait may have led to public opposition to the proposal.49 Since it is not possible to definitively state what became of the proposed agreement between Kuwait and the Comoros, the remainder of this section and the legal analysis in the following section focus on the agreement between the UAE and the Comoros. In the UAE, in response to the gap created by the roll-out of the national ID, the Ministry of the Interior commenced a registration campaign for the bidun in 2008, aiming to ‘place everyone in a category’.50 The Secretary General of the Ministry announced at the time: ‘once the process is completed, there will only be three sets of people in the country–citizens, expatriates and visitors. The remaining will be considered illegal’.51 The Ministry explained that a ‘registration card for undocumented persons’ would be issued to those who lacked documents, while those who failed to come forward would be labelled ‘illegal’ and arrested.52 Following the adoption of the agreement with the Comoros, those bidun who had been identified as ‘undocumented persons’ through the country’s registration campaign were contacted by local passport offices and instructed to apply for the Comorian passports within a three-month window, or else risk detention.53 Government press releases heralded the scheme as ‘the path to naturalisation’ for the bidun and newspaper articles explained that those seeking naturalization in the UAE would ‘need a passport to get a passport’.54 Applicants were informed that the Comorian passports were a temporary measure that would regularize their status in the UAE: the passports would transform the stateless bidun into foreign residents, making them eligible to apply for a temporary residency visa as part of the nation’s guest worker programme, the Kafala Sponsorship System.55 Applicants were assured that they could then apply