Kuwait Strips Citizenship From 2 Exiled Journalists

Deporting a critic requires holding one. Prosecuting one requires a courtroom. Revoking the citizenship of someone already living abroad requires neither, which is what makes the July decree worth reading closely: it is a punishment built to reach the people a government cannot otherwise touch.

Key Takeaways

• Emiri Decree No. 121 of 2026 stripped the citizenship of six individuals in July 2026, including the exiled blogger Mansoor al-Muhareb and the exiled freelance journalist Abdullah al-Saleh, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
• Commentator Mohammed Saleh al-Sabti was arrested in July 2026 after telling Al-Arabiya that "we hope Iran will submit to reason and make peace with its neighbors, and commit to agreements"; the charges remain unconfirmed.
• Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a US Kuwaiti journalist, lost his citizenship on April 29, 2026, together with his two sisters, days after release from roughly two months of wrongful detention.
• Kuwait fell from 128th to 136th of 180 countries in the RSF World Press Freedom Index between 2025 and 2026, its score dropping from 44.06 to 40.44.
• Human Rights Watch told the UN Human Rights Council in September 2025 that amendments to Kuwait's Nationality Law had already stripped more than 30,000 people, mainly women.

What Happened in Kuwait in July 2026?

Kuwait arrested one commentator inside the country and denationalized two journalists outside it, in the same month. CPJ's August 2026 report documents both together, and the pairing is the story: one instrument handles domestic speech, the other handles the diaspora.

Al-Muhareb, one of the six named in the decree, described it bluntly: "This is a harsh retaliatory measure against us, aimed at repressing us and making an example of us." Note the second half. That is not a penalty aimed at him alone; it is a demonstration staged for everyone else still writing.

CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah called the arrest "the latest example of the deteriorating press freedom situation in Kuwait," and criticized the authorities for weaponizing wartime conditions to silence journalists.

Why Did Al-Sabti's Television Appearance Matter?

Because what he said was conciliatory, not inflammatory, and he was arrested anyway. A red line you can locate is survivable; writers route around it. A line that catches a call for peace is unmappable, and unmappable lines produce a specific behaviour: people stop guessing and stop publishing. RSF notes that in 2026 the government issued official directives banning all coverage of the war on national security grounds, leaving little daylight between commentary and offence.

Why Is Revoking Citizenship Such an Effective Censorship Tool?

Because it removes the legal scaffolding a person's whole life rests on, without ever touching their body. Human Rights Watch told the UN Human Rights Council in September 2025 that Kuwaitis stripped under the amended Nationality Law were left "without documentation, travel rights, access to essential services, or proper medical care".

For an exiled reporter that cascades. A passport that cannot be renewed becomes an immigration problem, then a deportation risk. Bank accounts subject to identity checks start failing them. None of it requires the state to file a charge or win a hearing.

The Shihab-Eldin case shows the tool working alongside the courts rather than instead of them. CPJ reported that his citizenship was revoked on April 29, 2026, days after his release, along with that of two sisters who were not journalists at all. Prosecution ends. Denationalization does not, and it spreads sideways through a family.

How Does This Fit Kuwait's Wider Denationalization Campaign?

These six names sit inside a far larger programme that predates the war. MENA Rights Group and partner organizations have called on Kuwait to end the campaign of mass citizenship stripping. The HRW figure of more than 30,000 people affected by September 2025 dwarfs the handful of press cases CPJ can name. The machinery already existed; 2026 pointed it at the press. RSF is blunt about the gap between reputation and practice, describing a state that "despite its reputation as the least repressive country in the Gulf" exercises "a great deal of control over news and information."

Kuwait is not alone. CPJ's May 2026 survey of Gulf press crackdowns following the Iran war counted at least 109 people detained in the UAE for filming or sharing war related content, more than 300 arrests in Qatar in March alone, and a ten year sentence for a journalist in Bahrain. Its warning was about permanence: emergency measures introduced for a war tend to outlive it.

What This Means for a Journalist's Accounts and Inbox

Losing a nationality is also, quietly, an account security event, and almost nobody plans for it that way. In most Gulf states a SIM card is registered against a national identity document. Strip the document and the phone number attached to it becomes cancellable by an entity that is not you.

That number is very likely the SMS second factor on your email account, the recovery number that can trigger a password reset, and the identity anchor for a messaging app. Through that chain, a state that can revoke your citizenship can reach the mailbox holding years of source correspondence without ever compromising a password. It is not a spyware scenario; it is an ordinary consequence of tying account recovery to a state issued identity.

Email is the root of the tree: reset the mailbox and you reset nearly everything else. We have written before about how a journalist's address turning up in a breach corpus circulating on the dark web converts a working account into a targeting list entry. Denationalization arrives at the same place from the opposite direction: not by leaking the address, but by dismantling the identity that secures it.

What Should Journalists at Risk Harden First?

Start with the recovery paths, not the passwords, because recovery is the part an adversary with legal power over your identity can manipulate. In order of return:

• Remove your phone number as a second factor and as a recovery method. NIST's SP 800-63B digital identity guidelines restrict SMS as an out of band authenticator because the channel can be redirected. If your number can be cancelled by decree, it is not an authenticator; it is a liability.
• Enrol two hardware security keys. Two, because a single key is a single point of failure and re enrolling without one drops you back into the weak recovery paths you just removed. Google's Advanced Protection Program enforces key based sign in and closes phone recovery entirely.
• Print your backup codes and store them offline, outside the country you are at risk in. Codes kept in a cloud note are protected by the account they unlock.
• Set a recovery address on a second provider in a different jurisdiction, not tied to your national identity number, and check it monthly.
• Turn off automatic image loading in your mail client. Remote images report your IP address and approximate location to the sender every time you open a message. For someone in exile whose whereabouts are the sensitive fact, that is a real leak from an ordinary newsletter.
• Treat unexpected security alerts as adversarial until proven otherwise. Fake alert emails are a documented technique against reporters, as we covered when attackers spoofed Google security notifications to target journalists.

For a fuller checklist, CPJ maintains a Digital Safety Kit for journalists, and Access Now runs a Digital Security Helpline that responds to at risk users around the clock and in several languages.

What to Watch Next

Most coverage of a decree like this fixes on the six people named in it. The more consequential number is the one nobody publishes: the writers still holding Kuwaiti passports abroad who read it and decided the next piece was not worth it. Exile used to be where a crackdown ended, the place a reporter became safe enough to keep working. A revocation power that reaches across borders removes that endpoint.

The shape recurs. We tracked it in the detention of journalists in Pakistan and in the raid on Ethiopia's Addis Standard newsroom: an emergency justification, an instrument that outlasts the emergency, a press corps that quietly narrows what it covers. Kuwait's contribution is the discovery that you do not need custody of a journalist to impose a lasting cost on one.