News / Persian Gulf

Kuwaiti court jails activist for insulting judges on Twitter

Monday, 07 March 2016 1:39 PM [ Last Update: Monday, 07 March 2016 1:49 PM ]

This photo by Reuters shows a general view of the Kuwait Palace of Justice (court house) in Kuwait City on June 16, 2013.

Kuwait’s Supreme Court has upheld an earlier ruling by a lower court, jailing an online activist for four years for ‘insulting judges’ on Twitter.

The Supreme Court found Ahmad Fadhel guilty of writing comments on Twitter which were deemed insulting to a number of judges in the Persian Gulf state, the verdict said On Monday. The court rulings are final and cannot be challenged.

Three senior Judges had filed a complaint against Fadhel, saying his Tweets had defamed them.

In October 2014, the lower court issued the same sentence for the activist. The appeals court also upheld the ruling in February 2015.

Dozens of online activists have been jailed for insulting Kuwait’s rulers. Several others are still waiting trial for similar charges.

Last year, a Kuwaiti court also sentenced another online activist, Abdullah al-Enezi, to five years in prison for insulting the country’s emir. Enezi, a stateless activist, was arrested in February 2014 for attending a gathering of stateless people, known as bidoons, who called on the Kuwaiti officials to grant them citizenship.

Some 110,000 stateless people live in Kuwait. The government says it can grant citizenship only to 34,000 of them. After the end of British protectorate in Kuwait in 1961, the officials of the independent state granted citizenship only to those they called “founding fathers” and deprived a group of people of citizenship, who were called “bidoon jinsiya” or “without nationality.”

In June 2015, Kuwait’s Criminal Court also sentenced human rights activist, Rana al-Sadoun, to three years in jail for repeating a speech that criticized the country’s election law.

The speech was made by a former MP, Musallam al-Barrak, in 2012. Barrak and other opposition figures said that the election law had prevented them from getting power. The speech was read in video uploads by human rights activists and Barrak’s supporters.

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