Kuwait’s only female cabinet minister survived a no-confidence vote in parliament on January 22. During the January 8 nine-hour parliament questioning, Islamist MPs accused Minister of Education Nuriya al-Sabeeh of mismanagement, failing to uphold religious values, and of being responsible for “serious deterioration” in education standards. Al-Sabeeh categorically denied all the allegations and won the confidence vote by twenty-seven to nineteen. Maasouma al-Mubarak, who made history by becoming Kuwait’s first female minister in 2005, resigned last year after Islamist MPs summoned her to appear before parliament. Click here for more information.
Kuwaiti authorities arrested at least fourteen transgender cross-dressers between December 18 and 21 for violating Kuwait’s new dress-code law. The law, approved by the National Assembly on December 10, 2007, criminalizes “imitating the appearance of the opposite sex” and stipulates a punishment of up to one year in prison or a fine not exceeding one thousand dinars (U.S. $3,500). A January 17 statement by Human Rights Watch called the law “a violation of freedom of expression and personal autonomy” and urged the Kuwaiti government to free the prisoners.
On January 17, a Kuwaiti court ordered al-Jazeera satellite channel to pay a fine of 20,000 Kuwaiti dinars (U.S. $73,665) for “damaging Kuwaiti national sentiment” and “distorting the history of the country.” Four Kuwaiti lawyers filed the case after al-Jazeera aired an episode of “al-Ittijah al-Mu’akis” (The Opposite Direction) in which an Egyptian commentator accused Kuwait of “stealing Iraq’s oil” and blamed it for the 1990 Iraqi invasion. The channel’s studios in Kuwait have been closed twice before, in 1999 and 2002-2005. Click here for more.