Country Position Paper: Statelessness in Kuwait comprehensive figures on how many people have been stripped of their nationality, but the number is believed to be in the hundreds. The US State Department reported that: “A Council of Ministers committee created in 2017 to review citizenship revocations since 1991, received 200 appeals and sent their recommendations for 70 of those to the Council of Ministers. Seven families had their citizenship restored, while the other 63 were rejected”. 16 It has been reported that Kuwaiti children have had their nationality revoked as a consequence of their parents having their nationality revoked. 17 The largest stateless population in Kuwait are the Bidoon who have been left without access to nationality for many decades. Since the mid-1980s, their status and rights within the country has deteriorated. Key resources: HRW, Prisoners of the Past. Kuwaiti Bidun and the Burden of Statelessness, 2011 Amnesty International, Kuwait: Submission to the United Nations Human Rights Committee, 2016 Open Society, Without Citizens: Statelessness, Discrimination and Repression in Kuwait, 2011 Washington Post, The controversial plan to give Kuwait’s stateless people citizenship, 2016 POPULATIONS AFFECTED BY STATELESSNESS IN KUWAIT Bidoon The most well-known and largest stateless group in Kuwait are known as the Bidoon (also ‘Bedun’, ‘Bidoun’ or ‘Bidun’). The word Bidoon is Arabic for ‘without’ and has become shorthand for bidoon jinsiya – ‘without nationality’. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that 93,566 stateless people live in Kuwait. 18 Other sources estimate the total number of Bidoon in Kuwait to be between 80,000–140,000 people. 19 Origin of nationality problems Most Bidoon are descended from nomadic tribes native to the Arabian Peninsula. The causes of statelessness among them vary. For the vast majority, it is because these Bidoon groups were in Kuwait at the time the country gained independence in 1961.20 The Kuwaiti Government initiated a registration process to identify citizens, but a large number of people were not able to register and were excluded from the citizenship process. This was due to reasons such as the individual or family not understanding the new law or the importance of registering for citizenship, nomadic families not having sufficient proof of their link to the state, or simply that they were geographically too far away For more information on the denationalisation of citizens during this period see: Human Rights Watch (2014). Kuwait Government Critics Stripped of Citizenship. Access at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/19/kuwait-government-critics-stripped-citizenship 16 US Department of State (2018). Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2018: Kuwait. Available at: https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/289460.pdf. 17 See for example: The Guardian (2014, August 11) Kuwait Media Owner Stripped of his Citizenship. Access at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/aug/11/press-freedom-kuwait 18 UNHCR (2019). The World in Numbers. Available at: http://popstats.unhcr.org/en/overview 19 Beaugrand, C. (2017). Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality, and Society in Kuwait. 20 Minority Rights Group International (2017). Kuwait, Bidoon Profile. Available at: https://minorityrights.org/minorities/bidoon/ 6