Table 1 lists the main amendments of the Kuwaiti Nationality Law, in terms
of who can acquire the nationality and who cannot, even retrospectively
or after legally acquiring the nationality.
In practice, thousands of naturalised foreign wives of Kuwaiti husbands,
who acquired Kuwaiti citizenship through lawful means in the past,
are being stripped of their Kuwaiti nationality without the ability to
reacquire their original nationalities because they voluntarily abandoned
them when they were naturalised. These women represent the largest
number of affected citizens, reaching 30,000 persons in total over the
last five months of 2024.(7) The number is increasing as more revocations
of nationality are taking place every week. The Kuwaiti authorities
responded to complaints from the public about stripping legally obtained
nationality from Kuwaiti wives, saying it was due to errors in the past of
the legal mechanism of approving naturalisation.
This adds up to tens of thousands of existing stateless people in Kuwait.
Stateless persons (Bedoon) in Kuwait were already a major problem
and grew in number to over 92,000 people. (8) According to the United
Nations, this number is one of the largest in the world, considering
the population size of Kuwait. Movements by civil society and HRDs
in Kuwait were ongoing for decades to address this problem to no
avail. This is in addition to the classes of citizenship, with restrictions on
citizenship rights and privileges, which were created by the restrictive
Nationality Law and its amendments.
(7) https://www.gsn-online.com/news-centre/article/kuwaiti-repression-gathers-pace-thousandsmore-stripped
(8) https://www.refworld.org/policy/upr/unhcr/2015/en/104811
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Kuwait: Amendments to Kuwaiti Nationality Law
pose serious threats to human rights