A Kuwaiti Islamic activist and columnist is serving a three-month jail term for criticizing the emirate's justice department, his brother said Saturday.
Salah al-Rashed, a professor of psychology, was convicted of violating Kuwait's press laws in a May 1998 newspaper article in which he wrote that the justice department was so bureaucratic that it deserved to belong to former occupier Iraq.
In a previously unpublicized case, a criminal court issued its three-month prison sentence in Rashed's absence earlier this year, his brother Tareq al-Rashed told AFP.
Although an appeals court is due to hear the case on Sunday, Rashed gave himself up on November 13 and has since remained behind bars.
Rashed, who runs a private clinic for Islamic counseling, is a former head of the Islam Presentation Committee which in the past decade has helped more than 17,000 foreigners living in Kuwait to convert to Islam.
A university professor, Ahmad Baghdadi, was jailed in Kuwait for 13 days last year after he was convicted of blasphemy against Islam. He was sentenced to a month in jail but was pardoned by the emir, Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah -- KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
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