Minister of Justice: Online Judiciary... Preventing Divorced Women from Using Children as Revenge
Last month, His Excellency the Minister of Justice indicated that His Highness the Amir of Kuwait, may God protect and guard him, had given the green light to amend the legislative framework, announcing a review of four hundred laws by the end of 2027. These include penal, personal status, labor, and real estate registration laws, and he noted that the judiciary handles one million cases annually.
Last March, we published an article titled “For the Minister of Justice: The Time Has Come for Remote Justice” as a solution to address the overwhelming volume of cases. We urged him to expedite the digital and electronic infrastructure required to implement this mechanism, aiming to accelerate hearings and rulings through internet communication software for all judicial circles, following our observation of experiences in other Gulf countries.
Among the four hundred laws under review, the Personal Status Law holds significant importance due to its direct connection to society, family life, and the future of children. We began writing about this law more than twenty years ago, citing the numerous complaints it generated, in an article titled “The Kuwaiti Giant Devours Its Own Children,” aiming to curb the law’s mistreatment of fathers after divorce. This is because paternal involvement is a cornerstone of deep emotional and psychological security, essential for shaping personality and social skills.
As Your Excellency is aware, Kuwait’s Personal Status Law No. 51 of 1984 restricted its provisions to the Maliki school of jurisprudence, deviating from it only in the narrowest sense. The legislator ignored the opinions of other Imams and overlooked the harm inflicted on children amidst the increasing secularization of society and the loosening of behavioral norms, which often results in children being left in the care of domestic helpers rather than their busy custodial mothers.
The Kuwaiti law grants the divorced mother the power to inflict severe revenge by snatching the child from the father’s embrace in a single day, after years of being filled with love, causing emotional imbalance and psychological breakdown in the children. Sometimes months pass, and the father does not see his children after divorce due to reasons meticulously crafted by law firms. The law does not grant him custody of his daughter until she marries, or his son until he reaches maturity, adhering to the Maliki opinion while ignoring the views of the Shafi’i, Hanafi, and Hanbali schools, which permit the father to have custody of his son at age seven and his daughter at age nine. Consequently, the Kuwaiti law places the father seventh in the line of custody, after the mother, the maternal grandmother, the maternal aunt, the paternal aunt, and the paternal grandmother. It does not allow the children to stay overnight with him and limits his visitation to short periods. If the custodial mother prevents this for various reasons, he must prove the obstruction at police stations during his working hours, all while enduring insults as the ex-wife vents her resentment over the divorce and his remarriage, leaving the children as the victims. The father has thus become, as some describe him, sometimes unable to approach his children in public places outside of designated visitation days. This occurs despite psychoanalysts confirming the children’s urgent need for their father at age seven, aligning with the views of the three Imams other than Malik, who specified age seven as the point when a child no longer requires the service of women, granting the father custody in matters that are difficult for the custodial mother to manage due to his authority and presence in the children’s lives, such as taking them to mosques, from which children are often absent during the custody period.
Therefore, we urge Your Excellency to revise the Personal Status Law and lift the constraints of the Maliki school, so that mothers and fathers share custody of their children, and fathers’ visitation rights are unconditional and begin from the first day of separation. This will ensure children are removed from the sphere of the divorced mother’s resentment, which is not entirely her fault given its roots in her psychological formation linked to her physiology, and to prevent her from using children’s visitation as a tool for revenge against her ex-husband.
