Paper Identities: Kuwait’s Citizenship Revocation and Its Gendered Targeting

A grandmother in her 50s checks out of her weekly workout class with a shock. Her credit card payment for the class was declined because her bank account was frozen due to the annulment of her citizenship. Another woman has to plead with the leaders for a travel permit for her cancer-diagnosed mother. Hospitals now check the national identification cards of patients. The woman’s citizenship, acquired by naturalisation through marriage, was nullified. Overnight and unexplained.

Kuwait’s citizenship revocation programme initially began as an effort to check fraud and corruption. It has now snowballed into a mass campaign which is being systematically used as a political tool to silence and marginalise. The country has rescinded the citizenship of more than 37,000 since last August, a majority (approximately 26,000) of whom are women. Besides targeting women naturalised through marriage, the revocation scheme also affects those who are accused of deploying fraudulent means to obtain citizenship, and those cultural figures, like artists or singers, who acquired citizenship on the grounds of noble work. The enigmatic rationale offered by the government for this wide-scale citizenship withdrawal is a push for “national purity”. The Emir, in March 2025, in a televised address, explained that the aim behind these rampant moves was to return Kuwait to its original people, “clean and free from impurities.” 

Systematic exclusion and selective discrimination are not unheard of in Kuwait, which houses one of the world’s largest stateless populations. Kuwait continues to deny recognition and marginalise the Bidoon community, numbering around 1,00,000.  The recent wave of mass citizenship annulments comes in the face of a looming constitutional crisis in the country. Back in May 2024, the newly sworn Emir Shaikh Mishaal Al Ahmad Al-Sabah dissolved the Parliament under the garb of national security reasons. This was followed by the suspension of crucial constitutional articles, which precipitated a democratic regression. The nature and extent of the citizenship revocations, passed in an alarming absence of a Parliament, is nothing but a programme of statelessness by design.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND OTHER LEGAL VIOLATIONS

The widescale denationalisation is not merely a domestic policy concern. It raises alarming questions about human rights, gender-based discrimination and statelessness. It is strikingly in derogation of fundamental human rights as well as international humanitarian norms. Kuwait’s citizenship revocations run afoul of its constitutional guarantees. The 1959 Kuwaiti Law, under its Article 8, contains a provision for the acquisition of citizenship for wives of Kuwaitis, depending upon approval from the Ministry of Interior. Although even this provision is discriminatory insofar as it treats women as conditional citizens, it has benefited a large number of foreign wives. Post the 1991 Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi occupation, more than 38,000 women had been granted citizenship through naturalisation by way of marriage. Moreover, Article 13 under the same legal framework delineates the preconditions for withdrawal of citizenship, centred around corruption or perceived threats to national security. Coupled with Article 27, which guarantees due process in the deprivation or withdrawal of nationality, the 1959 law provided a robust rights-based framework for citizenship. 

However, far from the ideals of Kuwait’s freedom promises in 1991, the new decree law No.116/2024 (which is the legal basis for the current wave of denationalisation) does away with these safeguards. It eliminates the right of married women to citizenship, merely if the government deems their naturalisation invalid, without the scope of any judicial review. What makes this process arbitrary and against due process protection is the fact that the Supreme Committee leading the revocation programme has not publicly notified any criteria for the identification of individuals under the scheme. Affected individuals have no right to make a representation or to appeal the decisions. Citizens stripped of their nationality overnight only become aware of this fact when the Kuwait Gazette publishes a list of the same. The ‘grievance committee’ responsible for overseeing these mass revocations has not shown much promise. In addition to violating the due process clause, the legal changes enacted in December 2024 have a retrospective effect, which violates Article 32 of the Kuwaiti constitution.

In the absence of any legal safeguards, this arbitrary stripping of citizenship constitutes nothing but a legal black box, erasing an individual’s identity without evidence or explanation. Compounding the anguish is the wide-ranging handicaps that follow such arbitrary de-nationalisation. Documents such as identification cards and passports are immediately invalidated or seized. Jobs and salaries stay in an uncertain limbo. Bank accounts are frozen and social insurance payments are ceased. Rights of property disposal have been suspended, and disturbingly, the restrictions are being extended to essential services such as healthcare. Thus, by consigning tens of thousands of wives to either interim or permanent statelessness, the new decrees deprive them of fundamental rights of employment, healthcare and education. A former set of nationals is rendered marginalised and vulnerable to exploitation. 

Although Kuwait is not a signatory to the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, states are obliged under customary international law to prevent statelessness. The indiscriminate scope of this denationalisation runs afoul of many of the other international human rights treaties ratified by Kuwait, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The programme specifically contradicts Kuwait’s obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which strictly mandates equal nationality rights for men and women. Kuwait has, in the past, received repeated recommendations by the CEDAW (2017), the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) (2021) and CRC (2022) to remove the gender-discriminatory provisions in its citizenship laws. Despite these iterations, Kuwait’s human rights crisis around nationality continues to exacerbate. Kuwait continues to evade international legal accountability for its arbitrary denationalisation schemes. These large sets of denationalised persons would possibly seek refuge abroad, worsening the global challenge of dealing with statelessness. This risks a wider human rights emergency.

CONCLUSION

Kuwait’s deployment of citizenship laws- the rules of who gets to belong and who does not- as a political tool is not an isolated incident. It echoes in a regional as well as a wider global trend. Across the Gulf, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman have mirrored such tactics. Dissenters, political opponents and ethnic minorities are disenfranchised of their nationality. Similar patterns are also emerging in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect about these controversial moves is the looming global silence surrounding them. In Kuwait’s instance, for example, no major international human rights body, or the United States, issued any substantial statement. The discourse remains confined to civil society groups. The silence is not neutral; it is an implicit endorsement, a complicity by the world community. Without adequate external pressure, such flagrant violations of human rights will continue to multiply. The gendered or racialised structure of these oppressive citizenship laws produces a new “fourth class” of citizens, neither legal residents nor foreign nationals. The Kuwait nationality crisis must perhaps ring the alarm bells loudly for the global stakeholders to act swiftly and strongly. It might not be long before there is widespread clamour from the swelling populations of those who are capriciously rendered stateless-legally erased, socially present, and administratively silenced.