Decree BlogRiyadh is the CEO at Decree. Prior to co-founding Decree, Riyadh worked for over 16 years of as a lawyer for the government of Oman. His areas of subject matter expertise include public international law, technology law, and intellectual property. He holds an LLB from the University of Cardiff, an LLM in IT and Commerce from Southampton University, and a PhD from SOAS, University of London. Riyadh is also a co-founder of Open Data Oman.
This week’s issue of the Official Gazette included the full text of Royal Decree 28/2024 Establishing the Omani Waqf Establishment and Promulgating Its System, which is a brand new government entity responsible for managing and investing waqf as well as the treasury, known as Bait Al-Mal, of the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs.
Late last month, the EU formally adopted the EU AI Act, the first comprehensive and legally binding AI framework adopted anywhere in the world. Somewhat like the GDPR, the EU AI Act has extraterritorial application, and it is likely for this act to become the international legislative standard that countries around the world replicate when developing their AI legal frameworks.
We are launching today Decree Risk—a brand new structured database intended to help organisations engaging with Omani businesses manage their risk by providing timely updates on liquidation, capital reduction, legal form transformation, and other risks associated with Omani companies.
We have been experimenting over the past two months with adding a standalone button to let users download the content of Decree as a pre-formatted PDF. Even though it has always been possible to download content from Decree using the Print PDF option available in most browsers, a number of users have spoken to us asking for this to be done more easily, and we are happy to finally have this feature enabled.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning published in this week’s issue of the Official Gazette a decision issuing the Form of the System of Real Estate Owners Associations that is intended to be binding on Real Estate Owners Associations and read alongside the System of the Apartments and Floors Ownership and its executive regulation.
After almost 2 years from the issuance of the Personal Data Protection Law, the Ministry of Transport, Communications, and Information Technology published in this week’s issue of the Official Gazette the long-awaited Executive Regulation of the Personal Data Protection Law. When the Personal Data Protection Law was issued in 2022, it was a groundbreaking development for the Omani legal system since it was the first comprehensive privacy legislation to be issued in the country, however, due to the fact that the law left many of the practical implementation details to the executive regulation, many organisations in Oman had struggled waiting in frustration as they were unable to comply because the regulation was not issued, which was extremely problematic because this law grants the courts the power to impose fines up to 500,000 Rial Omani against those who fail to comply with the law.
I hope that I can say that the wait is finally over now that the regulation is finally out, but, realistically speaking, it will probably take the government at least several months to be able to create the processes required for them to receive and process applications relating to the permits envisioned by the law, and for this reason, the decision issuing the executive regulation has given another 1 year grace period for all parties involved to comply with the regulation and, by association, comply with the law.
This blog post will highlight some of the key features of the new regulation.
The year 2023 was an exciting year for Decree. Decree was formally incorporated, we started our commercial operations, and managed to make available in English every single royal decree and ministerial decision published in the Official Gazette in the year 2023 at a speed and quality never seen before. In fact, we do not believe that in the history of this country had the entire body of Omani legislation of a whole year been ever made available in English before by any person or organisation.
The Tender Board published in today’s issue of the Official Gazette a brand new Regulation Governing Local Content that requires government entities subject to the Tender Law to impose local content requirements for any contract with a value exceeding 500,000 Rial Omani. The aim of this new regulation is to develop national human resources and to support local products and small and medium enterprises.
The Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning (MHUP) published in this week’s issue of the Official Gazette a new Governance Regulation of Land Planning Controls that replaces the Governance Regulation of Land Planning Controls of 2013. This was done to comply with the requirements of the new Oman National Spatial Strategy.
The Tender Board published in today’s issue of the Official Gazette a brand new Regulation Governing Government Projects that formally adopts the quality gate approach for managing projects carried out by entities subject to the provisions of the Tender Law.