KUWAIT CITY, 22 March 2005 — Kuwaiti pro-women activists have launched a campaign to collect signatures of citizens backing women’s suffrage in a bid to sway opponents and convince undecided MPs, a leading activist said yesterday.

“We are running from home to home in each electoral district asking men and women over 21 years of age to sign petitions that would be submitted to their MPs,” Rula Dashti, chairwoman of Kuwait Economic Society, told AFP.

The petitions declare total support for women’s right to vote and run in parliamentary elections and urge lawmakers to support these rights, Dashti said.

“This is a way to tell MPs that their voter base is with women’s rights and they have to heed their voters’ wishes. We are now focusing on undecided MPs and later we will move to opponents,” she said.

According to Dashti, a government-proposed bill granting women full political rights has secured the backing of a large number of lawmakers and “we are only two to three MPs short of an absolute majority.”

State Minister for Cabinet Affairs Mohammad Daifallah Sharar said Saturday he would meet with Parliament’s interior and defense committee tomorrow to discuss the bill. Parliament consists of 50 elected MPs and the Cabinet’s 15 ministers are also entitled to vote, which makes the required majority to pass the bill 33 votes.

Justice Minister Ahmad Baqer, an elected MP, is a hard-line Salafi Islamist opposed to women’s rights and is not expected to vote for the bill. So far, 13 MPs have publicly said they would vote for the bill while at least 15 others, many of them pro-government, have yet to make up their minds.

The main opposition comes from the bloc, comprising 13 MPs, and their tribal allies who are against women’s rights on religious and social grounds.

But the Ministry of Islamic Affairs on Saturday issued a new fatwa authorizing the emir to eventually rule on the controversy over whether to give women political rights.

Emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah favors giving women the vote. In 1999, he issued a decree granting women full political rights but it was narrowly rejected by Parliament the same year.