Nod to citizenship for 4,000 bedoons, rights commission

KUWAIT: The National Assembly yesterday passed two key legislations: The first to grant citizenship for up to 4,000 stateless people known as bedoons during 2018, and the second to establish a human rights commission. The first law was overwhelmingly passed in the first and final readings and was sent to the government amid calls by lawmakers for the government to speed up the naturalization of bedoons, especially the 34,000 people whom the government has said qualify for Kuwaiti citizenship.

Head of the Assembly’s interior and defense committee MP Askar Al-Enezi said the interior minister has pledged to grant citizenship to bedoons who, or their forefathers, were counted in the 1965 census and others who have contributed excellent services to the country. MP Riyadh Al-Adasani said the government should grant citizenship to all those who deserve it without a law and rejected that the legislation should be applied for political reasons.

MP Safa Al-Hashem said citizenship should be granted only to those who were part of the 1965 census. MP Saadoun Hammad said a number of bedoons

were pressured to take up citizenships of other countries and these people should not be excluded from consideration for Kuwaiti nationality. Bedoons, who currently number around 120,000, claim they are Kuwaiti citizens and are entitled to the country’s nationality. The government insists that they or their ancestors had entered Kuwait and then destroyed their identification papers to claim the right to Kuwaiti citizenship.

During the past two decades, the government adopted a string of measures against bedoons to force them to produce their original identifications. But the government has acknowledged that 34,000 of the bedoons qualify for citizenship, although authorities have done nothing to grant them their right. MP Adel Al-Damkhi, who heads the Assembly’s human rights panel, said the central agency for bedoons has informed it that it has already studied the files of 90 percent of the 34,000 bedoons and their naturalization awaits the approval of this legislation by the Assembly.

MPs however differed on the second law for the establishment of the National Commission for Human Rights. A number of MPs demanded that the commission should be independent from any government influence, especially with regards to the appointment of the commission’s chairman and his deputy. But other lawmakers raised some constitutional objections, and the Assembly voted 41-16 to allow the government to make the office bearers’ appointments. Several MPs protested that this will undermine the commission’s independence and work. The Assembly then refused to hold a second round of voting to give time for more discussions on the draft law. The Assembly session was then adjourned prematurely for a lack of quorum.