KUWAIT CITY: Kuwaiti deputies on Sunday called for a special parliamentary debate to resolve the humanitarian issue of thousands of stateless Arabs in the country, MP Faisal Al-Duwaisan said.

The lawmaker told reporters that 24 MPs out of the 50-member house signed the request to hold a special session on Dec. 10 to coincide with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Known locally as bidoons, stateless Arabs number between 70,000, according to the government, and about 120,000, according to human rights bodies and activists.

“These people have been suffering as they are deprived of their basic human rights like education, medical treatment and obtaining identification papers including birth, marriage and divorce certificates,” Duwaisan said.

He said the bidoon issue is also negatively affecting Kuwait’s reputation abroad.

“We should resolve this issue and close this file permanently,” he added.

Kuwait launched a crackdown on bidoons in 2000, depriving them of their essential rights in a bid to force them to reveal what the authorities say is their true identity. The government insists that most bidoons came from neighboring countries after the discovery of oil in the 1930s.

Authorities said that following the crackdown, some 20,000 bidoons disclosed their original citizenship and were given residence permits like other foreigners.

Most bidoons however claim to be Kuwaitis whose forefathers — who lived as Bedouins in the desert — failed to apply for citizenship when the state first introduced its nationality law in 1959.

Now the government says that bidoons, or their ancestors, came to the oil-rich Gulf state before 1965 qualify to apply for citizenship, but it is not a guarantee they would be naturalized.

About 250,000 bidoons lived in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion of 1990, but many have fled after Kuwait’s liberation in February 1991 at the hands of a US-led international coalition.

Thousands of those who remained have since acquired third-country citizenship.

Some are employed in the Kuwaiti army and police force but many others are not allowed to work, a situation for which Kuwait has repeatedly come under criticism by international human rights bodies.

On Saturday, a group calling itself Kuwaiti Bidoons Congregation launched a three-month campaign aimed at securing basic human rights for stateless Arabs.