Kuwait has been ruled by the AL-SABAH dynasty since the 18th century. The threat of Ottoman invasion in 1899 prompted Amir Mubarak AL-SABAH to seek protection from Britain, ceding foreign and defense responsibility to Britain until 1961, when the country attained its independence. Kuwait was attacked and overrun by Iraq in August 1990. Following several weeks of aerial bombardment, a US-led UN coalition began a ground assault in February 1991 that liberated Kuwait in four days. In 1992, the Amir reconstituted the parliament that he had dissolved in 1986. Amid the 2010-11 uprisings and protests across the Arab world, stateless Arabs, known as Bidoon, staged small protests in early 2011 demanding citizenship, jobs, and other benefits available to Kuwaiti nationals. Other demographic groups, notably Islamists and Kuwaitis from tribal backgrounds, soon joined the growing protest movements, which culminated in late 2011 with the resignation of the prime minister amidst allegations of corruption. Demonstrations renewed in late 2012 in response to an amiri decree amending the electoral law that lessened the voting power of the tribal blocs.
An opposition coalition of Sunni Islamists, tribal populists, and some liberals, largely boycotted legislative elections in 2012 and 2013, which ushered in a legislature more amenable to the government's agenda. Faced with the prospect of painful subsidy cuts, oppositionists and independents actively participated in the November 2016 election, winning nearly half of the seats, but a cohesive opposition alliance largely ceased to exist with the 2016 election and the opposition became increasingly factionalized. Between 2006 and his death in 2020, the previous Kuwaiti Amir dissolved the National Assembly on seven occasions (the Constitutional Court annulled the Assembly elections in June 2012 and again in June 2013) and shuffled the cabinet over a dozen times, usually citing political stagnation and gridlock between the legislature and the government.
The current Amir, who assumed his role in 2020, launched a \"National Dialogue\" in September 2021 meant to resolve political gridlock. As part of the \"National Dialogue,\" the Amir pardoned several opposition figures who had been living in exile, and they returned to Kuwait. Legislative challenges remain, and the cabinet has been reshuffled six times since late 2020.
Kuwait-Iraq: no maritime boundary exists with Iraq in the Persian Gulf
Kuwait-Saudi Arabia: their maritime boundary was established in 2000 and has a neutral zone but its extension to Iran’s maritime boundary has not been negotiated
" }, "Refugees and internally displaced persons": { "stateless persons": { "text": "92,000 (2022); note - Kuwait's 1959 Nationality Law defined citizens as persons who settled in the country before 1920 and who had maintained normal residence since then; one-third of the population, descendants of Bedouin tribes, missed the window of opportunity to register for nationality rights after Kuwait became independent in 1961 and were classified as bidun (meaning \"without\"); since the 1980s Kuwait's bidun have progressively lost their rights, including opportunities for employment and education, amid official claims that they are nationals of other countries who have destroyed their identification documents in hopes of gaining Kuwaiti citizenship; Kuwaiti authorities have delayed processing citizenship applications and labeled biduns as \"illegal residents,\" denying them access to civil documentation, such as birth and marriage certificates" } }, "Trafficking in persons": { "tier rating": { "text": "Tier 2 Watch List — Kuwait does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so; officials reported disaggregated data for the first time, including data on a forced labor conviction and identification of male victims; Kuwait also implemented a program to increase oversight of foreign worker recruitment and provide greater protections to vulnerable migrants; however, the government did not demonstrate overall increasing efforts compared to the previous year to expand its anti-trafficking capacity; there were fewer investigations of alleged trafficking crimes and significantly fewer convictions and prosecutions of traffickers; the government decreased funding for victims and domestic worker protection programs for the second consecutive year; no steps were taken to reform the visa sponsorship program that continued to leave migrant workers highly vulnerable to exploitation; some officials routinely used arbitration and administrative penalties rather than investigate cases as human trafficking crimes; the government did not regularly use standard procedures to proactively identify victims and refer them to protection services, and it continued to detain, prosecute, and deport potential trafficking victims; therefore, Kuwait was downgraded to Tier 2 Watch List (2022)" }, "trafficking profile": { "text": "human traffickers exploit foreign victims in Kuwait; men and women migrate primarily from Bangladesh, Egypt, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and other countries in South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East to work predominantly in the service, sanitation, construction, transportation, hospitality, and domestic service sectors; unskilled laborers and female domestic workers are especially vulnerable to forced labor and physical and sexual abuse; many labor-source countries, including Bhutan, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, and Zimbabwe continue to restrict female nationals from domestic employment in Kuwait due to the high risk they face; some visa sponsors subject migrants to forced labor and, to a much lesser extent, sex trafficking; Cuban nationals working in Kuwait may have been forced to work by the Cuban government; Kuwait’s sponsorship law restricts workers’ movements and penalizes them for leaving abusive workplaces; reports indicate some workers fleeing abusive employers are exploited in sex trafficking by recruiters or criminals (2022)" } } } }