Posts Tagged ‘Kuwait’
December 14th, 2010
Al Jazeera’s office in Kuwait City has been
shut down after the news channel broadcast footage of police brutality against members of the Kuwaiti opposition. The footage showed police beating activists, and the channel aired interviews with members of the Kuwaiti opposition. Four Kuwaiti members of parliament and a dozen citizens were injured in the incident. The official reason for the closure given to Al Jazeera was “the latest developments and your interference in Kuwait’s internal affairs”. Al Jazeera’s Kuwait office was previously closed in November 2002 in the run-up to the US led invasion of Iraq.
August 3rd, 2010
Kuwait has asked BlackBerry’s Canadian maker RIM to
block pornographic sites though they will not
suspend the messenger services like their Gulf neighbours.
RIM have agreed to block 3,000 porn sites and have promised to do so by the end of this year.
July 16th, 2010
A court in Kuwait City has
acquitted a journalist prosecuted for insulting Kuwait’s Prime Minister. Journalist
Mohammed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem and activist Khaled Al-Fadala, had their charges dropped on 12 July . Al-Jassem was accused of libelling the prime minister on a talk show entitled “Who is to blame, the government or the parliament?”. Al-Fadala’s case was initiated following an official complaint from the prime minister following the activist’s claim that the prime minister was an “enemy of freedom of expression” in Kuwait. Al-Jassem was jailed after he was convicted of
slander in April 2010 in a separate case.
June 11th, 2010
On 9 June, hundreds of Kuwaitis attend a rally to
call for the release of opposition journalist and lawyer
Mohammed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem. Accused of harming the national interest and undermining the Kuwaiti ruler, al-Jassem has been held in detention for over a month. He was sentenced to six months in prison after he authored a number of articles and books critical of the local political situation.
May 18th, 2010
A Kuwaiti journalist was
hospitalised over the weekend after refusing medication and beginning a hunger strike in protest at his 11 May arrest. Government critic, Mohammed Abdel Qader al-Jassem, claims he was arrested for political reasons. The
national security ministry has been interrogating the journalist and reviewing every blog post he has written in the past five years. He was sentenced to six months in prison in
April for slandering Prime Minister Sheikh Nasser Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, though the decision was later suspended pending an appeal.
May 17th, 2010
The
Kuwaiti media have been
banned from reporting on the dismantling of an Iranian spy network by prosecutor-general Hamed Saleh Al-Othman. The spy ring— which was publicly revealed on 1 May— was gathering information about Kuwaiti and US military bases on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Al-Othman told Al-Aan newspaper that he blocked further reporting of the case in order to allow the police and judicial authorities to investigate it without additional pressure. Reporters without Borders called the ban “a serious obstruction of investigative reporting.”
April 14th, 2010
At least
21 Egyptian expatriates have been arrested and deported from Kuwait for supporting Mohamed ElBaradei. The former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency champions political reform in Egypt and is being tipped as
a potential presidential candidate. About 30 ElBaradei supporters were arrested in a café on Thursday for what the Kuwaiti interior minister, Sheikh Jaber al-Sabah, said was an
illegally assembly. Kuwait police had previously arrested three other ElBaradei supporters. Egypt has claimed they
had no hand in these arrests and deportations.
AFP reports that more than 400,000 Egyptians live in Kuwait, the country prohibits non-Kuwaitis from participating in demonstrations.
April 7th, 2010
Kuwaiti journalist Mohammed Abdel Qader Al-Jassem was convicted of
slander and sentenced to six months in prison on April 1 for publicly declaring that Prime Minister Skeikh Nasser Mohammed Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah was unsuitable to run Kuwait and calling for his resignation. Al-Jassem is currently out on bail awaiting the outcome of his appeal against the conviction, he has at least five other government lawsuits outstanding and was fined 7,000 euros in March for an earlier article that criticised the Prime Minister.
