Kuwait bans 16,000, including citizens, from travel in two months
Orders issued over cases related to family lawsuits, rents, power bills, bounced checks
Cairo: Some 16,000 Kuwaiti citizens and expatriates have been banned from leaving the country in January and February of this year for legal reasons, the country’s justice authorities have disclosed.
The figures were disclosed by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Justice’s Travel Ban Department that cited relevant official orders issued against the persons in question.
Meanwhile, 8,033 travel ban orders were lifted during those two months.
Some 6,642 travel ban orders were issued in January against 9,006 in February. Meanwhile, 6,642 travel ban orders were lifted in January and 3,811 in February, according to the figures.
Al Ahmadi took the lead among Kuwait’s six governorates in terms of the travel ban orders issued during the two months with 4,321 followed by Farwaniya with 3,641, Hawalli with 2,452, Jahra with 2,381, and the Capital with 1,757 while Mubarak Al Kabeer finished last with 1,096.
The ban orders were mainly linked to cases involving bank checks, outstanding instalments, rents, power bills and family lawsuits, Kuwaiti newspaper Al Qabas quoted an unidentified source as saying.
The number of travel ban orders issued by the Family Court in the two months totalled 1,211 including 620 injunctions in January.
Kuwait has an overall population of 4.8 million people including around 3.2 million foreigners.
As of last September, Kuwait began implementing a government decree requiring all expatriates to pay their electricity and water bills before leaving the country. Earlier, the Interior Ministry alerted foreigners to clear all their outstanding traffic fines before leaving Kuwait.