After being in the making for almost a decade, the Omani Personal Data Protection Law is finally out. This vital piece of legislation aims at protecting what is considered by many as the most fundamental right in the digital age, and one that those living in this country badly needed. While there is no doubt that this law is groundbreaking for the Omani legal system, it only provides the bare minimum of rights in comparison to contemporary data protection laws elsewhere, includes wide exemptions for government entities to process personal data without the need to comply with the law, and leaves a significant amount of critical specifics to a future executive regulation that will be issued by the Ministry of Transport, Communications, and Information Technology (MTCIT).
Author: Riyadh Al-Balushi
Riyadh 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.
Decree Monthly Digest is a summary of the most significant royal decrees and laws issued in the previous month.
Four royal decrees were issued in January, and none of them related to the promulgation of any new laws. These royal decrees can be summarised as follows:
Royal Decree 1/2022 Ratifying the General Budget of the State for Fiscal Year 2022
The General Budget of the State provides a projection of the revenue and expenditure of the Omani government for the upcoming year. The level of detail and transparency that the Omani government provides in this public document exceeds what the majority of countries in this region disclose as it provides a breakdown for defence and security expenditure, civil ministers expenditure, gas production expenditure, and public debt service along with a civil ministry-by-ministry revenue and expenditure breakdown. You can view the budget in full on this link and read the controls for preparing and adopting this budget by reading the Financial Law.
As part of the continuous effort for restructuring of the government, a new government entity called the Royal Academy of Administration was established by merging the Institute of Public Administration (which was a proper government entity established by royal decree in 1980) and the Institute of Capability Development (which was an internal department created within the Diwan of Royal Court in recent years and most famously known for conducting the National CEO Program). The new Royal Academy of Administration will be under the Patronage of His Majesty, will have the Minister of the Diwan of Royal Court as the chairman of its board of trustees, and will be responsible for developing leadership and capabilities in both the public and private sectors.
Royal Decree 3/2022 Appointing the President of the Royal Academy of Administration
Dr Ali bin Qassim Al-Lawati was appointed as the president of the newly established Royal Academy of Administration. He was previously in charge of the Institute of Capability Development that was responsible for the National CEO Program. Dr Ali was originally appointed by royal decree in 2012 as an advisor for studies and research in the Diwan of Royal Court with the special grade.
The final decree of this month ratified a double taxation agreement between Oman and Qatar. This is a routine agreement that Oman signs with countries from around the world, but is the first that Oman signs with a GCC country. The objective of this agreement is to avoid double taxation and to help combat tax evasion. The full text of the treaty was published in Arabic last week and we hope to upload our translation of it very soon.
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OLCS 2.0
We are announcing today the release of the second edition of the Oman Legal Citation Standard (OLCS), which is a guide for citing primary Omani legal authorities in academic works and legal documents. OLCS aims to create a consistent standard for citing Omani legislation and other primary legal sources in a manner that makes it easy for the reader to identify the sources used and to predict the manner of their citation.
OLCS is designed as a supplement to the Oxford Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities (OSCOLA) exclusively in regard to Omani primary legal sources. The users of OLCS should refer to OSCOLA for general formatting rules as well as all matters relating to international law sources and secondary sources.
The first edition of OLCS was released in 2016, and it has been revised to reflect the new approaches followed by Decree in structuring the titles of royal decrees and laws and to include more current examples of cited laws.
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Welcome to Decree
When we started Qanoon.om in 2015, we did not anticipate that it will transform the way Omani society accesses the law and engages with it. This tool that we created to fulfil our own immediate need for a resource to locate Omani legislation somehow became the most important legal resource that judges, lawyers, and government officials use on a daily basis to uphold the rule of law, defend the rights of people, and give vital legal advice. Qanoon has become one of the most critical resources for teaching law in Oman and SQU’s College of Law links to it from its homepage, journalists in Oman use it for investigative reporting to produce evidence-based pieces that could not have been made possible without it, and United Nations bodies cite it in their official reports as the authority when evaluating Oman’s compliance with its obligations under international law. We also know that Qanoon is vital to some of the most vulnerable groups in society and that visually impaired Omanis used it to know their rights because Qanoon, unlike official resources, is compatible with screen reading technologies. It is no exaggeration to say that Qanoon has actually democratised Omani law and made access to Omani legislation in its original language the easiest and most convenient body of legislation to access in the entire Arab world.