MP Abdullah Fahhad Al-Enezi

KUWAIT: The issue of bedoons or stateless residents needs to be solved as soon as possible because of its humanitarian nature, a lawmaker said yesterday, accusing authorities concerned with the topic of deliberately delaying any solution for the decades-old problem.

MP Abdullah Fahhad Al-Enezi further said in a press statement that the Central Apparatus for Illegal Residents, which was established a number of years ago to find a final solution to the bedoons' problem, should be dissolved and merged into the Interior Ministry after it failed to achieve its targeted goals.

"This issue bedoons' has been turned into an experiment field for officials at the central apparatus," he underlined, noting that many stateless residents remain deprived of basic human rights including access to permanent 'security IDs' or any form of identification. Instead of traditional civil IDs, the Kuwaiti government started in recent years to hand over security IDs that can be used to have access to a number government services, but not to all privileges that a civil ID holder normally receives. Furthermore, people that the government says are not qualified for consideration to receive the Kuwaiti citizenship are often given temporary IDs valid for up to six months, while in some cases bedoons were not given any IDs.

By Meshaal Al-Enezi