Kuwait Code of Criminal Procedure and Trials (Law No. 17 of 1960), as amended — police custody, pre-trial detention, access to a lawyer, interrogation, coerced confessions and appeal deadlines

The Code (Law No. 17 of 1960; the exact day of issue is not stated in the consolidated text reviewed) regulates the prosecution of crime from report to appeal. Its provisions on liberty and interrogation are those most often relevant to reports.

CUSTODY AND DETENTION. Police who arrest a person, or receive one arrested by a private individual, must hand him to the investigator. Nobody may be held for more than four days without the investigator's written order of pre-trial detention (Art. 60). During that period the police must let the accused contact his lawyer or inform a person of his choice of what has happened (Art. 60 bis). Anyone held by the police or remanded must be told in writing why, and must be able to engage a lawyer and meet him in private at any time (Art. 74 bis). Pre-trial detention to prevent flight or interference with the investigation may last up to three weeks from arrest. Thereafter the accused must be brought before the president of the court, who may renew it for up to fifteen days at a time (Art. 69). Longer detention needs an order of the trial court, on the investigator's request and after hearing the accused: thirty days at a time, up to six months for felonies and three months for misdemeanours (Art. 70). No one may be remanded for a misdemeanour punishable by no more than three months' imprisonment or by a fine (Art. 70 bis).

TRAVEL BANS. The Public Prosecutor, or the Director-General of Investigations, or officials delegated by them, may ban an accused from travelling abroad when the investigation requires it. Any person concerned may challenge the ban before the competent court, which must decide promptly, and may challenge again only after three months (Art. 74 bis (a)).

INVESTIGATION AND INTERROGATION. The accused and the victim may attend all steps of the preliminary investigation, each with a lawyer. The lawyer may speak only with the investigator's permission, and the investigator may order secrecy when necessary (Art. 75). The investigator must first put the charge to the accused orally. A confession is recorded immediately and examined in detail; if the accused denies, he is examined after the prosecution witnesses. The accused may refuse to speak or ask that questioning wait for his lawyer. He may not be put on oath, nor subjected to inducement or coercion. He may at any time present his defence, question prosecution witnesses and ask for defence witnesses (Art. 98).

COERCED EVIDENCE. If the court finds that the accused's statements or confessions resulted from torture or coercion, it must treat them as void and of no evidential value (Art. 159). The exception is statements of an accused offered a pardon under the following article.

RECONCILIATION. For offences prosecuted only on the victim's complaint, and for assault and battery punishable by no more than five years, trespass, damage to private property, threats and extortion by threats, the victim may pardon the accused or settle with him for money, before or after judgment (Art. 240). This has the effect of an acquittal. Outside complaint offences it takes effect only with the court's approval (Art. 241). Decree-Law No. 93 of 2024 excluded insults and assaults on public officials from this mechanism (see the Penal Code entry).

2024 AMENDMENT. Decree-Law No. 104 of 2024 (issued 30 September 2024; Kuwait Al-Youm No. 1707, 5 October 2024) replaced Art. 201. The time limit for appeal is thirty days from pronouncement of a judgment given in the presence of the accused or on opposition, or from when a judgment in absentia can no longer be opposed. It also added Art. 22 bis, allowing a court or investigator to serve a summons by e-mail or any modern means of communication that can be stored and retrieved.

USE IN A REPORT: these are the statutory safeguards against which accounts of arrest, incommunicado detention, interrogation without counsel or coerced confession should be measured. A report should distinguish what the Code requires from evidence of what happened in a particular case or in practice generally. The four-day limit (Art. 60), the right to counsel (Arts. 60 bis, 74 bis, 98) and the exclusion rule (Art. 159) are the provisions most often in issue.

SOURCE: the Arabic text was read in full on lawskw.com (Kuwait Laws Portal), a private publisher of consolidated Kuwaiti legislation. The authoritative text is the Official Gazette (Kuwait Al-Youm); gazette numbers and dates above are as shown by the source.

On paper the Code's safeguards are substantial: a four-day ceiling on police custody, a right to counsel in private, a right to silence, and exclusion of coerced confessions. Reports by UN bodies and NGOs elsewhere on this record describe gaps between these provisions and practice in some cases, particularly those involving state security. Neither the law nor those reports alone establishes what happened to a particular person. Where a claimant's account involves detention beyond four days without a written order, or questioning without access to a lawyer, the account is inconsistent with the Code rather than with any authorised practice; that is a point for analysis, not a finding.