ABU DHABI, 26 October 2006 — The UAE government plans to naturalize around 10,000 people who have been living in the country without citizenship for more than three decades, the WAM news agency reported yesterday.
A commission established in April is close to finalizing a preliminary list of stateless people who have lived in the country prior to the formation of the federation of the United Arab Emirates, said Interior Minister Seif ibn Zayed Al-Nahayan quoted by WAM. The UAE was established on Dec. 2, 1971.
The commission will prepare a list of people who have the right to naturalization, the minister added. There are around 10,000 stateless people in the UAE, according to the Interior Ministry. They are mainly of Iranian or Asian origin, or from Zanzibar, which has a history of trade relations with the region.
The commission “has updated the list of stateless people with the right to naturalization to include their families in order to avoid any confusion,” said its president Abdul Aziz Al-Sharifi, who is also chief of preventive security in the Interior Ministry.
To be eligible for naturalization, a person must have lived permanently in the UAE prior to the creation of the federation in 1971, possess no documents proving former nationality and have no criminal record, Sharifi said.
“Those who do not fulfill these conditions will not be treated as stateless people and the interior minister will treat them as illegal residents,” he said.
Citizenship for stateless people — sometimes referred to by the term “Bidoun” which means “without” in Arabic and Farsi — is an issue in several Gulf states where many of them have settled since the 1960s.
The seven-member UAE federation includes Dubai, a business and tourism hub, and Abu Dhabi, the capital. According to official statistics, 4.1 million people live in the UAE and 21.9 percent of them are indigenous.
