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Kuwait MP slams government over ‘stateless’ people

January 19, 2017 at 5:12 pm

The Kuwaiti National Assembly [Xiquinhosilva / Wikipedia]

Kuwaiti MP Fahad Al-Enezi slammed his country’s government over its negligence in resolving the status of the so-called “stateless” population, Kuwait Times reported on Tuesday.

Al-Enezi criticised the Central Apparatus for Illegal Residents (CAIR) after its failure to deal with the problem of stateless people, who are people who have no citizenship status in Kuwait or other countries, and said it should be dissolved and merged into the Interior Ministry.

The CAIR was established to find a sustainable solution for stateless Kuwaiti citizens, an issue that was central to protests that broke out in the Emirdom in 2011.

He claimed that the “status of the [stateless] populations has been turned into an experiment field for officials.” The stateless population in Kuwait, better known as the bedoon population, literally “those without”, are estimated to range from 93,000 to 180,000, or around ten per cent of the Kuwaiti population.

Other figures estimate that the bedoon population in Kuwait is actually closer to 300,000, meaning potentially a third of the population of Kuwait do not have Kuwaiti citizenship, despite being born and raised there.

The Kuwaiti government has claimed numerous times that a large proportion of the bedoon are actually foreign nationals who have disposed of previous identity documents for various reasons to obtain Kuwaiti citizenship.