Smuggling drugs in the Gulf is a high-risk enterprise, with frequent death sentences for dealers and mules. It is possible Sheikh Talal Nasser al-Sabah believed that being a relative of Kuwait's rulers would protect him.

Now, with a death sentence hanging over the sheikh for drug trafficking, the oil-rich emirate is waiting to see whether the strict rule of law or the kinship ties of the ruling family will prevail.

The sheikh, who is in his fifties, was caught by Kuwaiti police with 10kg (22lb) of cocaine and 165lb of hashish. When sentencing him to death, Judge Humoud al-Mutwatah said that he had “willingly walked the path of evil” and deserved no mercy.

It was the first time that a member of a Gulf royal family had been condemned to death by a court, and is widely seen as a test case for the impartiality of the law in a country where the convict's relative, the Emir, could pardon his wayward kinsman. The sheikh was the nephew of a previous Emir of Kuwait, Jaber al-Sabah, who died in 2006, and is one of hundreds of members of the huge ruling family. Lawyers at the time hailed the sentence as a sign of the impartiality of the law. Najib al-Wugayyan, a prominent criminal lawyer, called the verdict “a magnificent indication to all that nobody is above the law”.

However, Sheik al-Sabah has announced in the Kuwaiti press that he has appealed to the Emir to grant a pardon, and that senior members of the Royal Family were lobbying for him with the country's ruler.

Any such decision could upset Kuwaiti politicians in the constitutional monarchy, where parliament has some oversight powers to hold the ruling family accountable. To carry out the death sentence could cause consternation in the other family-ruled countries of the region, where Kuwait's decision to allow women to vote in 2005 was met with disapproval.

In addition to drugs trafficking, Sheikh Talal was also found guilty of laundering the proceeds and of illegal possession of two pistols and a shotgun. In his home, police found scales and a mixer used to prepare the drugs for sale. Three of his associates received life sentences for trafficking, while two others were jailed for seven years for money laundering. The judge said that the sheikh had “threatened society ... especially young people” who bought drugs from him.

Kuwait, a tiny country awash with oil wealth and close to drug-smuggling routes from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to Europe, has long struggled with drug problems and has initiated strong anti-drug measures in the past. As well as government rehabilitation programmes, Kuwait also doles out heavy penalties to those caught dabbling in the trade — long prison terms and the gallows for those involved in serious smuggling.

Since it introduced the death penalty 40 years ago Kuwait has executed more than 70 people, most of them convicted for drug smuggling or murder. The first drug-related executions were in 1998 when two Iranians found guilty of smuggling heroin were hanged.

Strict as the laws are, they are not as harsh as those in Saudi Arabia, where smugglers convicted of trafficking marijuana have been beheaded. Even there, however, a member of the Royal Family, Prince Nayef bin Sultan bin Fawwaz al-Shaalan, has been caught up in drug trafficking.

Last year a French court sentenced the Prince in absentia to ten years in jail and a $100 million (£50 million) fine for his part in a plot to smuggle two tonnes of cocaine from Colombia to an airport outside Paris in 1999, using a private aircraft and diplomatic immunity to move the drugs. Since Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with France or the US, the Prince was not jailed.

The conviction was not Sheikh al-Sabah's first run-in with the law. In 1991 he was arrested by Egyptian police and charged with smuggling heroin, although he said at the time that it was all for personal use.

Sheikh al-Sabah continues to deny that he is a drug dealer and said that he has left his fate to the Emir. “I am drug-addicted and I am getting cured. I don't deal,” he told the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Jareeda from his jail cell. “I don't know whether Kuwaiti society is satisfied with the ruling of the judiciary or not. But it is in the hands of the Emir.”

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