The Most Famous

SOCIAL ACTIVISTS from Kuwait

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This page contains a list of the greatest Kuwaiti Social Activists. The pantheon dataset contains 840 Social Activists, NaN of which were born in Kuwait. This makes Kuwait the birth place of the 0th most number of Social Activists.

Top 1

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Kuwaiti Social Activists of all time. This list of famous Kuwaiti Social Activists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography's online popularity.

Photo of Khalid El-Masri

1. Khalid El-Masri (b. 1963)

With an HPI of 44.81, Khalid El-Masri is the most famous Kuwaiti Social Activist.  His biography has been translated into 14 different languages on wikipedia.

Khaled El-Masri (also Khalid El-Masri and Khaled Masri, Levantine Arabic pronunciation: [ˈxaːlɪd elˈmɑsˤɾi, -ˈmɑsˤɾe], Arabic: خالد المصري; born 29 June 1963) is a German, Lebanese and French citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest was a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, whom the CIA captured from 2001 to 2005, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. In May 2004, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Daniel R. Coats, convinced the German interior minister, Otto Schily, not to press charges or to reveal the program. El-Masri filed suit against the CIA for his arrest, extraordinary rendition and torture. In 2006, his suit El Masri v. Tenet, in which he was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, based on the U.S. government's claiming the state secrets privilege. The ACLU said the Bush administration attempted to shield its abuses by invoking this privilege. The case was also dismissed by the Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit, and in December 2007, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case. On 13 December 2012, El-Masri won an Article 34 case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court determined he had been tortured while held by CIA agents and ruled that Macedonia was responsible for abusing him while in the country, and knowingly transferring him to the CIA when torture was a possibility. It awarded him compensation. This marked the first time that CIA activities against detainees was legally declared as torture. The European Court condemned nations for collaborating with the United States in these secret programs.

People

Pantheon has 1 people classified as Kuwaiti social activists born between 1963 and 1963. Of these 1, 1 (100.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Kuwaiti social activists include Khalid El-Masri. As of April 2024, 1 new Kuwaiti social activists have been added to Pantheon including Khalid El-Masri.

Living Kuwaiti Social Activists

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Newly Added Kuwaiti Social Activists (2025)

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