Kuwait to ease residency visa for five nationalities

Work on pending visas of nationals under a Kuwait visit ban, but who have entered the country, will now be completed, an interior ministry source has said. Kuwait last month banned nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan from entering the country. It also suspended granting all tourism, visit and trade visas as well as visas sponsored by spouses and halted work on converting visit visas of those who had entered Kuwait to join their families into residency visas. "The new directives will help those who were inside the country and met all the criteria," an interior ministry source told Al Siyassah daily. Article continues below MP Mohammad Hayef welcomed "the humanitarian decision" and called for its "prompt" implementation. Last week, Kuwait-based Syrian nationals urged Shaikh Ahmad Al Humoud, the interior minister, to help them by providing solutions to the challenges their family members faced over immigration laws. The Syrians working in Kuwait said they were caught in a dilemma after they were unable to complete the visa paper work for their wives and children following a decision to bar five nationalities, including Syrians, from entering the country or processing their applications. The family members had entered Kuwait on visit, dependency and commercial visas and the Syrian workers wanted to convert them into residency visas. The expiry of the initial visas before achieving the new status would mean breaking the rules by overstaying and wading into legal problems, they said. According to the daily, the Syrian nationals said that their relatives could not return to Syria due to the tense situation and appealed to the interior minister to consider their situation within a humanitarian context. The Kuwaiti authorities could approach their case the way they dealt with the Egyptians during the revolution, they said, insisting that they did not ask for allowing more Syrians into Kuwait, but rather wanted a quick solution for those whose visit visas expired. Kuwait's blanket visa ban was attributed to the "difficult security conditions in the five countries" and to "the remarkably increasing tendency of nationals from the five countries to apply for visas to bring in relatives who faced or could face arrest by the local authorities to Kuwait." Immigration sources said the authorities insisted that no exception in the visa application would be tolerated, but added that the ban was temporarily and would be lifted after the security situation stabilised.