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Habib Toumi

Observations from the Arab world and beyond

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Archive for February 14th, 2010

Bahrain’s public prosecutor on Sunday requested the death penalty for 19 men accused of murdering a policeman but acquitted by the High criminal Court in October.

The men had been tried for their alleged role in the death of Majid Asghar Ali Baksh, a 24-year-old Pakistani policeman, in an ambush near Karazakan, a village around 20 kilometres south west of Manama, the capital.

Prosecutors argued that his police patrol car had been showered with Molotov cocktails and stones in April 2008.

However, the suspects have denied the charges and their lawyers contested the evidence against them. Following a long trial the court ruled that there was no evidence against the men and allowed them to go home on October 13. The acquittal was celebrated with great fanfare and amid widely reported scenes of jubilation in Karazakan and other villages. continue reading…

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MP Rola Dashti

Kuwait is determined to end discrimination against women in the workplace, a woman lawmaker has said.

“Kuwait is keen on improving its laws and rules to eliminate discrimination against women in the workplace,” Rola Dashti has said. “Despite all the difficulties and challenges there has been some positive progress and we plan to continue the movement forward,” said Rola, a Johns Hopkins University PHD holder who heads the health and work committee in the Kuwaiti parliament.

Rola, listed among the world’s 100 most influential Arabs in 2007 and 2008, was one of four women elected last year to the parliament, ending the men’s monopoly that marked it since it was formed.

Women in the conservative Kuwaiti society have been facing an uphill struggle for more rights despite visible support from the country’s amir and government members.

Recently activists have been pushing for amending the laws to allow Kuwaiti women married to non-Kuwaiti to benefit from government-sponsored housing schemes and to be able to transmit their nationalities to their children.

On Saturday, Rashed Al Radaan, a Kuwaiti columnist writing for Al Watan daily highlighted the suffering and pain of a Kuwaiti woman who was told that she could not give her two properties to her two children because she was married with a foreigner and her children could not get the Kuwaiti nationality, a major condition for owning real estate in the country. continue reading…

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Isa Al Shaiji with parliament Speaker Khalifa Al Dhahrani

Bahrain Journalists Association (BJA) has rejected the draft press law submitted by a parliamentary committee, saying that it failed to meet the aspirations of the media. “We deplore the insistence of the service committee in the lower chamber on a link between the press law and the penal law,” BJA chairman Isa Al Shaiji said. “We resent this link because it makes it possible to imprison journalists. We have repeatedly warned against allowing this link, but the committee did not care about our demands,” he said in a statement ahead of the first parliamentary debate on the draft.

The 40-member lower chamber is scheduled to review the draft on Tuesday amid concerns that it would reinforce controversial articles.

“We want all journalists in Bahrain to head to the parliament on Tuesday to show to the MPs their displeasure with the draft law. We have often said that putting journalists in prison clashed with the reforms launched by King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa and with the demands of the people working in the media sector,” said Al Shaiji whose association is the main umbrella for hundreds of Bahrain-based journalists. However, sources familiar with the draft said that there has been a “gross misreading of the new text and that the latest amendments gave journalists greater freedom. continue reading…

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