It has not been a year since the beta version of Decree launched, and the website has already grown to become the biggest English language database of Omani legislation available anywhere with a complete title index of all Omani royal decrees and ministerial decisions published in the Official Gazette since 1974 onwards, a full-text catalogue of essentially every single royal decrees issued in the past six years, a collection of over a 150 standalone laws with all their amendments consolidated, the most comprehensive catalogue of Omani treaties available on the internet with over 800 documents, along with a growing collection of the most recent ministerial decisions and regulations issued in the Official Gazette.
Decree has not only demonstrated that it is possible to provide a comprehensive resource of translated Omani legislation in English at world-class quality, but it also demonstrated how it can be done at a speed never seen before. The translation of royal decrees are made available on Decree within a few hours of their announcement on the news and days before their publication in the Official Gazette, while the full translation of laws can be made available on Decree in English on the same day as their publication in the Official Gazette.
Decree has become so fundamental to the daily work of many lawyers in Oman who need to access reliable and accurate translations of Omani laws in English without having to wade through random, unlabelled, and unstructured collections of PDFs and Word files of questionable quality and unknown sources stored on their company’s network drives.
We believe that there is so much more that can be done. Our collection of translated legislation is still merely a fraction of the Omani legal system, and English-speaking lawyers in Oman need to have access to ministerials decisions and regulations to have a complete picture of the law. We also have a lot of ideas for new categories of content needed by the legal community and new website functionality to make Decree even more useful.
To achieve these goals, Decree needs to be sustainable, must employ full-time staff, and has to pay for advanced technical infrastructure to ensure the continuity of the service as our website grows. For this reason, we are announcing that the free beta version of Decree will end by 1 January 2023, after which only users with paid subscription plans will be able to access the content of Decree.
We will announce details of the pricing of our plans and new functionalities dedicated for corporate accounts in the next few weeks leading to the graduation of Decree from the beta stage.
We would like to thank every single person who has used our service, helped us with testing the features, and provided us with feedback on how to improve.
We would be more than happy to chat about the future of Decree with any of the users. You can get in touch with us by writing to [email protected].