Kuwait detaining journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin after social media posts
Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, an award-winning international journalist, has been detained for over a month by the Kuwaiti authorities following social media posts related to the Iran war, campaigners say.
The 41-year-old, an American-born Kuwaiti national, was arrested on 2 March while visiting family in Kuwait. He has been arbitraily detained since then with limited access to his lawyer.
The reasons for Shihab-Eldin’s arrest remain unclear, but the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that it came after he made a series of social media posts related to the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The posts included footage of a US fighter jet crashing into a US air base in Kuwait. The CPJ emphasised that he had shared publicly available footage and images.
The press freedom organisation added that Shihab-Eldin is likely charged with spreading false information, harming national security, and misusing his mobile phone - which it says are routinely used against independent journalists by the Kuwaiti authorities.
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Shihab-Eldin has contributed to a number of prominent outlets including The New York Times, Al Jazeera English and PBS. His work has garnered multiple awards, including a British Journalism Award and an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender Award.
The CPJ warned that his detention comes amid a broader crackdown on online speech in the region amid the US-Israeli war on Iran.
The Kuwaiti authorities - as in other Gulf countries - have imposed increasingly tight restrictions on online speech in the wake of escalating regional tensions in order to limit reporting about attacks on its infrastructure.
On 2 March, Kuwait’s Ministry of Interior issued a statement urging people not to “photograph or publish any clips or information related to missiles or relevant locations”, and warning that several people had already been arrested for “spreading false news”.
Weeks later, new legislation was introduced imposing a 10-year sentence for anyone who “disseminates news, publishes statements, or spreads false rumors related to military entities” with the intent of undermining confidence in them.
According to the Gulf Centre of Human Rights (GCHR), dozens of people have been arbitrarily detained since the war began for “peacefully expressing their opinions on social media”.
The rights group added that most detainees were held in secret state security prisons for days at a time and denied contact with families and legal counsel.
GCHR said that governments in the region are “exploiting the current war, are intensifying their systematic repression to suppress public freedoms, including freedom of expression online and offline”.
Rights group HuMena said that other prominent detainees in Kuwait include Farrah Alsaqqaf and Suad Al-Munayes.
CPJ's Sara Qudah said in a statement that Shihab-Eldin’s detention is “emblematic” of a growing trend among Gulf countries of “using national security as a pretext to crackdown on freedom of speech”.
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