I have just been offered a Principal post at a girls school in Kuwait — with a generous executive contract and package. I’d like to accept the offer but we’re having difficulty getting a straight answer about the process for my husband’s visa. He’s a non-teaching spouse and will accompany me, and would like to look for suitable work once we’re settled. We’re both Australian — he has dual nationality, Libyan. We’ve been married 10 years, no dependents, and as an international teacher, he has accompanied me to 5 different countries on my work contracts. My schools have always sponsored him as a ‘dependent spouse’ in each of those countries. In each country we’ve lived, he has looked for work once we’ve settled, and then gone through the appropriate procedures to have his ‘dependent spouse visa’ updated to work legally. This is what we plan to do if I accept the post in Kuwait.

The Kuwaiti Consulate here says my school can sponsor him, by giving permission for him to ‘accompany me as a dependent spouse’. But the HR at the school says that even though they’d like to, they can’t do anything to help, because he will not be employed by them, and a ‘wife can not sponsor her husband’. They are advising that he enters on a ‘visit visa’ and has it renewed every 3 months when we leave for term breaks — but the Consulate says that only Diplomats get 3 month visit visas, and that he’d have to renew every month — they repeat that I should ‘work closely with my school to arrange his visa’ and that we both need the school to lodge our visa request through the Ministry of the Interior in Kuwait, so that we can collect our visas here at the Consulate in Saigon, before departure — my current school is in Saigon and we are residents here until Aug 31.

Please can you advise what we should do, and exactly what the legal procedure is to secure my husband’s legal residency status in Kuwait — he will clearly need to be able to drive and access emergency health care if needed, and understands that he can’t work until a prospective employer sponsors him, should he find a job after settling. We do not want to break the law, or risk being separated or put him in a situation where he could be deported.

We both have ‘squeaky clean records’ and have police clearances from every country in which we have lived and have always been sure to be model citizens, and to follow legal procedures on all things.
I’m sure my school’s HR would be happy to provide what they needed to, if they knew there was a legal procedure to secure his ‘accompanying male spouse visa’ in the first instance. I think the problem is that they just do not know how to do it because they have assumed the law says it’s impossible.

Name withheld
Answer: There is a minister’s decision in place which says that teachers can sponsor their spouses and in most cases it has remained just that – a decision.

Teachers in the public sector don’t face any problem in sponsoring their husbands but the same can’t be said for the private sector.

You just have to try ‘your luck’. And that also will happen after you have got your own residence. The school can’t apply for your husband’s residency, it is you who has to do it but whether your application is accepted or not is a different matter.