S TAT E L E S S B Y D E C R E E Scope of Kuwaiti Nationals Challenging Revocation Decisions Kuwait nationals have, infrequently, been able to challenge government practice in relation to the implementation of laws (emphasis added), namely by asserting the administrative character of citizenship revocation decisions made by the Supreme Committee to Investigate Kuwaiti Citizenship or the Minister of Interior. The Sabr news platform reported in May 2015 that a Court of First Instance, Administrative Circuit, ruled that assertions and actions by the Ministry of Interior were insufficient grounds for the revocation of a specific claimantʼs nationality. 64 In March 2016, the Court of Cassation overruled lower courtsʼ decisions in relation to the implementation of citizenship revocation found that the governmentʼs conduct was not act of sovereignty, but rather an act of administration, and that the GoK had wrongly stripped the claimant (and his children) of his (their) nationality, possibly based on the revocation of his fatherʼs citizenship. 65 A 24 March 2015 article in Kuwaitʼs al-Jarida newspaper detailed the case. 66 Taken chronologically in terms of the legal challenge mounted by the man, some of the key elements may include that: • Lower courts had ruled that they did not have jurisdiction in the case since the act of citizenship stripping is sovereign; not administrative (unlike the Court of Cassation) in Kuwait; • And that the claimant: • Was Kuwaiti by virtue of his father, who obtained citizenship three years before his birth and not, himself, naturalised; and that he had a Kuwaiti wife and children; • Appealed the decision to strip him of his nationality but the government failed to respond; • Asserted that the GoK had violated Article 27 of the Constitution, where revocation or withdrawal of citizenship, except within the limits of the law as well as Article 166, which guarantees the right of litigation (in relation to government decisions, for example); • Submitted three separate, linked appeals to the Court of Cassation, which were taken together and then ruled as one; and • Argued that the application of the law required, as per the Constitution, giving the judiciary the right to monitor the legality of the administrative (emphasis added) decisions and to demonstrate their compliance with the law. In February 2021, however, one report described how the Constitutional Court rejected (to consider) an appeal addressing the eligibility of individuals for citizenship where alleged proof of the eligibility emerged after the deadline provided for in the 1959 Nationality Law. 67 30