Kuwaiti Bidoon

At 12.00 today, Nasser al-Anezy, Chair of the Kuwait Community Association and I met Alistair Burt MP and FCO officials to discuss the plight of the Kuwaiti Bidoon. The Minister agreed that we would sound out the European Union to see what might be done at that level to ratchet up the pressure on Kuwait to end statelessness. There are 100,000 stateless Bidoon according to official statistics, but the real total is probably higher.

There is a new Human Rights Watch report coming out by the end of the year, which ought to help focus some public attention on the problem and hence, greater interest from governments.

This evening I gave a pre-arranged radio interview to Sabbir Rahman Khan, a Bangladeshi journalist of daily Kaler Kantho (www.kalerkantho.com), presently living in Sweden and working as the paper's Scandinavian correspondent.