KUWAIT: Over 10,000 stateless residents have amended their legal status and admitted to having another nationality over the past 14 years, a Kuwaiti government agency announced Saturday.

Kuwait’s Central System for the Remedy of Situations of Illegal Residents (CARIRS), which was established in 2010 to address issues related to the country’s stateless residents, known locally as bedoon, publicized the numbers in a KUNA statement.

There’s an estimated 100,000 bedoons in Kuwait, according to EuroMed monitor. Most bedoon are descendants of nomadic tribes from across the Arabian Peninsula. When Kuwait gained independence in 1961 and subsequently started to register its nationals, around a third of the population were unable to register for a variety of reasons and were left stateless. Any child of a bedoon father is also stateless, regardless of whether the child is born in Kuwait and even if the mother is a Kuwaiti national. The Kuwaiti government classifies bedoon people as “illegal residents” from neighboring countries who are concealing their true nationalities and continuously calls on them to amend their status.

According to the CARIRS statement published Saturday, between 2011 and until August 2024, the statement said, 10,256 stateless residents reverted “to their original nationalities”, according to the statement. There were 6,054 people who admitted to being originally from Saudi Arabia, 1,188 from Iraq, 868 from Syria, 131 from Iran, 53 from Jordan and 1,962 others to different nationalities. The statement added that these statistics include individuals with “parents or relatives with documents from different countries.”

Due to the country’s classification of bedoons as illegal residents, they have been deprived of many civil, political, and social rights, especially those pertaining to work, health care, education, and public services, as well as participation in public assemblies. Many live in relative poverty and social segregation.

The Kuwaiti government has recently intensified its crackdown. In July, the country announced it was suspending issuing temporary passports to bedoons until further notice, with the exception of cases in which the person requires the travel document for studying or treatment abroad. All passports given according to Article 17 of the citizenship law, through which some bedoons have been able to obtain travel documents, are now considered null and void. A statement said the decision was made to allow for further deliberation on the status of bedoon people by relevant authorities.

The UN Human Rights Committee has brought the bedoon issue to Kuwait’s during its latest review of the human rights situation in the country. The UN agency has requested Kuwait to “provide information on measures to end all forms of discrimination against bedoon residents,” according to an agency report dated November 29, 2022. It’s also asked for Kuwait’s comment on claims that “Bedoon seeking to renew their identity cards are subjected to pressure to renounce Kuwaiti citizenship claims in order to secure the renewal.” A report by the Center for Civil and Human Rights, says Kuwait’s UN delegates justify restrictions on bedoons “by arguing that illegal residents cannot enjoy some of the rights of their citizens, as they have no passports.”