Bid to list Kuwait Towers as World Heritage Site
Minister of Information and Minister of State for Youth Affairs and the head of the National Council for Culture, Arts and Letters (NCCAL) Sheikh Salman Al-Humoud Al-Sabah announced yesterday that a delegation from the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) advisory panel was considering listing Kuwait Towers on the World Heritage List. Sheikh Salman added that he had met with the delegation from ICOMOS, a global non-government organization associated with UNESCO. Its mission is to promote the conservation, protection, use and enhancement of monuments, building complexes and sites. It is currently visiting Kuwait to assess historical Kuwaiti sites nominated for listing on the World Heritage List. He added that the delegation will visit Kuwait six months later to make its final decision before submitting the file to be reviewed by the UNESCO’s World heritage Committee members pending final voting. “This first visit will focus on the Kuwait Towers,” he explained, noting that besides the towers, other Kuwaiti sites include Failaka Island and Sheikh Abdullah Al-Jaber AlSabah’s palace. Sheikh Salman added that on every visit, the delegation would make a full report about the nominated site’s pros and cons so that shortfalls, if any, could be dealt with.
A number of lawmakers yesterday filed their financial disclosure statements to a special team from the Public Anti-Corruption Authority dispatched to the parliament to collect the statements, one day before the 60-day grace ends today. MP Adnan Abdulsamad hailed the anticorruption initiative but remarked that it should have been done earlier, especially since the forms MPs have to fill need some explanation. “It would have been better if the anti-corruption authority had stationed its team in the parliament throughout the grace period, because it is a new experience and requires some explanations,” he underlined.
MP Hamdan Al-Azmi said he intends to propose a bill to include officials’ wives in the financial disclosure statements as first-degree relatives. He also explained that some officials register the ownership of all their possessions in wives’ names to avoid legal accountability.
The anti-corruption verification committee manager Saleh Al-Tunaib said that the team was dispatched to the parliament to facilitate the process for lawmakers as the 60-day grace they had been given since assuming their positions on Nov 27, 2016 ends today. “This step came out of cooperation with the parliament’s secretariat general,” he stressed, pointing out that several MPs had already checked in with the authority over the past few days. He urged all MPs to file in their statements and called on those who would not be able to do so to check in at the authority headquarters today because nothing would be accepted later.