Kuwait Abolishes Article 153 in Landmark Win for Women’s Rights

In a landmark move, Kuwait has repealed Article 153 of its penal code, a law that effectively treated the murder of women by male relatives as a misdemeanor. Under the provision, men who killed their wives, sisters, daughters, or mothers faced, at most, three years in prison or a small fine. On March 16, that loophole was finally closed.

The repeal follows years of campaigning by activists and mounting public outrage over a series of high-profile femicides. It marks a rare reckoning in a region where so-called honor killings are often met with silence—or state-sanctioned leniency. Kuwait also raised the legal minimum age of marriage from 16 to 18 in the same reform package, aligning its civil code with international child protection standards.

But for women like Farah Akbar and Sheikha al-Ajmi, the change came too late.

In April 2021, Farah Akbar was killed after months of warning authorities she was being stalked and threatened by a man whose marriage proposal she had rejected. Despite filing multiple police complaints, no serious action was taken. The man abducted her in broad daylight in front of her child, stabbed her in the chest, and dumped her body outside a hospital. Last week—after public pressure—the case was reopened, and a court upgraded the attacker’s sentence from life in prison to death.

Just a few months earlier, Sheikha al-Ajmi —a young Kuwaiti parliamentary employee—was murdered by her brother. Some say he disapproved of her job as a security guard; others claim he was enraged by her plans to marry outside their tribe. Whatever the reason, he murdered her. And the parliament she once served said nothing—not a statement, not a eulogy.

Alanoud Alsharekh, a prominent Kuwaiti women’s rights advocate and founder of the Abolish 153 campaign, called the repeal a critical step forward.

“For the past decade, the Abolish 153 Campaign has fought for this change,” she told More to Her Story. “We’ve led three bills on this issue in Kuwait’s National Assembly and contributed to the 2020 domestic violence law. I’m deeply thankful to His Highness Emir Sheikh Meshal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah and the Council of Ministers for this historic decision and the unwavering support we have received along the way.”

Still, the fight is far from over.

A 2018 study by Chatham House found that more than half of Kuwaiti women—53.1%—had experienced some form of violence in their lifetime. In 2022 alone, the Kuwait Society for Human Rights recorded 860 cases of violence against women and girls—more than two per day. Many more go unreported. In a study conducted at primary healthcare centers between 2017 and 2019, nearly 60% of women said they had experienced at least one form of domestic violence. One in three said they would never report it.

“While repealing Article 153 is a monumental achievement, making this change real in the lives of women in Kuwait will be an even greater challenge,” said Payzee Mahmod, a British-Kurdish campaigner against honor-based abuse and child marriage. “‘Honor’ crimes are rooted in patriarchal norms. Changing the law is essential—but changing the mindset takes longer.”

Kuwait now joins a small group of Arab countries, including Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates, that have repealed laws granting leniency in so-called honor crimes. But others—like Syria, Yemen, and Egypt—still maintain legal loopholes that reduce penalties for perpetrators.

The question now is whether Kuwait’s repeal of Article 153 will mark a broader shift toward accountability across the region—and whether countries like Saudi Arabia, where perpetrators of so-called “honor” crimes can go unpunished under laws that grant them immunity, and Jordan, where killings by male family members have surged by 94% in recent years, will follow suit.