Not only is our database the most comprehensive, but Decree is now unquestionably recognised by the hundreds of users paying for our service for providing the highest quality legislation translations available anywhere with an unmatched availability speed as the majority of items were uploaded to Decree within a matter of hours of the release of the Official Gazette.

Even though Decree is a paid service, the spillover benefits of our service cannot be disregarded. The success of Decree allows us to keep Qanoon a free resource of critical importance to the Omani legal system that hundreds of thousands of Omani people use to access the law. Decree’s own paid subscription is also only required to view the attachments of royal decrees, and not the royal decrees themselves, and given that 75% of royal decrees have no attachments that require translation, this means that 75% of our content is free and is in fact used by thousands of users in Oman who are not paying members of Decree.

We have set our goals on transforming the way legislation is accessed beyond Oman, and for this reason, earlier this year, we launched Qanoon Saudi and Decree Saudi. Even though it has only been a few months since we launched these two new websites, thousands of users in Saudi have already used our websites to locate Arabic and English texts of new Saudi legislation. Similar to our operation model in Oman, Qanoon Saudi will continue to remain as a free resource, while Decree Saudi will now be available through a paid subscription service starting from today.

We have also redefined the scope of what Decree offers in Oman to go beyond legislation and Intel by introducing Decree Risk, a solution we built based on the needs of our existing customer base who engage with Omani businesses and want to manage potential risks that arise from such engagements. By providing timely updates on liquidation, capital reduction, legal form transformation, and other pertinent incidents, Decree Risk has become an invaluable tool for our customers in the telecom and banking sectors who need to swiftly respond to risk incidents relating to their customers.

2025: What’s Next for Decree

Our vision for the year 2025 is to create new specific solutions by addressing specific challenges facing legal professionals in Oman beyond the need to have basic access to the law. Our first project in this area will target governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) professionals in Oman that will initially provide a curated collection of toolkits that streamline the process of complying with new Omani legislation, with a view of expanding the scope and nature of these toolkits as we develop this product in consultation with our users. Our toolkits will be developed in-house by our highly qualified team of Omani lawyers.

We have been lucky to work with some of the biggest names in the Omani legal industry to deliver public engagement activities and we are delighted to announce that DecreeCon is coming back this year on the 22nd of January with more than double the number of sessions of DecreeCon2024. If you are a member of Decree, make sure to mark your calendar to attend the biggest legal event in the country.

Thanks to Our Members

We would not be able to continue our mission without the support of our members, and we hope that we are able to continue to serve them by providing the best solutions for empowering society with legal knowledge.

We are still in the early stages of building the English database of Decree Saudi Arabia, and we welcome feedback from our users regarding items from the backlog of Saudi legislation that they would like to see translated on Decree.

Similar to the Omani version of Decree, Decree Saudi Arabia is linked with Qanoon Saudi Arabia, and it is possible to use the English website to locate legislation items even if they are not translated so that the user can view the original document or use Google translate to access the document.

Decree Saudi Arabia also has its own free weekly newsletter that notifies users of the contents of new issues of Umm Al-Qura.

Please note that the login details of Decree.om are NOT linked with the login details of Decree Saudi Arabia. Upon the official launch of the service, both services will be accessible using a unified access system.

Decree Saudi Arabia is available free of charge until the end of the year. It will be available as an add-on to Decree.om customers.

You can stay up to date with Decree Saudi Arabia by following our Saudi LinkedIn account.

Today, we are taking Decree Risk to the next level by announcing Risk Watchlist—a tool that allows organisations to monitor future risk incidents by adding the CR number of a target company on the Risk Watchlist to receive immediate alerts when any of these target companies appear in a risk announcement.

An example of the case use of Risk Watchlist is the use by a litigation department to monitor a counterparty in a court case or an arbitration. Due to the lengthy duration of court cases and arbitrations, a troubled counterparty in a dispute may decide to liquidate halfway through a case without notifying the other party. If this other party does not submit its claims to the liquidator on time, it loses its chance to recover any money.

Decree Watchlist helps these organisations address this challenge by monitoring the CR of any company they need to track. If this company is involved in any risk incident tracked by Decree Risk, such as liquidation, capital reduction, legal form transformation, or merger, the user will receive an email alert within hours of the risk incident taking place.

Risk Watchlist uses Decree’s own database that is populated daily by monitoring the Official Gazette and all daily newspapers to report all risk announcements.

Decree Watchlist is available free for all Decree users until the end of their current contracts without any additional charges. It will be available afterwards through a bundle subscription.

This service is being offered to cater to a small number of our customers established by royal decree who provided us with feedback that they need to comply with KYC checks by providing attested versions of the royal decrees establishing them.

Even though required only by a small number of our customers, we decided to provide this service to make our offerings more comprehensive.

Please note that this service is available to all Decree customers but it only applies to Decree content and additional charges will apply.

For more information or to submit an attestation request, please click the link below:

Decree signed earlier this week a memorandum of understanding with the Modern College of Business and Science (MCBS) to cooperate in the fields of legal awareness activity, professional development programmes, community service, and other fields. MCBS staff and students are already regular attendees of Decree events, and Decree and MCBS intend to collaborate in hosting a number of joint activities that target MCBS and the wider community in collaboration with public and private sector partners.

MCBS has also recently subscribed to Decree and plans on using Decree content to inform its business operations and to supplement its legal educational materials.

Legal departments in banks, telecom and utility companies, and other organisations dealing with large numbers of Omani businesses spend a significant amount of time every week collecting and transcribing risk announcements published in the Official Gazette and daily newspapers to make sure that they lodge their claims to liquidators if one of their debtors goes into liquidation or to make sure that they make a formal objection to the Ministry of Commerce, Industry, and Investment Promotion if their debtors reduce their capital or merge with another company before they pay their debts.

Decree Risk improves the ability of such organisations to recover the money they are owed from their debtors by providing timely and accurate updates on the following risk incidents: (1) Liquidations, (2) Capital Reduction, (3) Legal Form Transformation, and (4) Mergers.

Unlike the majority of content previously published on Decree, Decree Risk is intended to be utilised in a structured machine-readable format such as CSV and Excel to allow organisations to import the data directly into their systems to verify if any of the business they engage with have gone into liquidation or are about to undertake a legal form transformation. Decree also offers Decree Risk through an API to enable organisations to integrate directly with our database and automate the use of Decree Risk data.

Decree Risk is updated on a daily basis within hours of the announcement of the risk incident.

Decree Risk is available free for all Decree users until the end of their current contracts without any additional charges, and will be available afterwards through a bundle subscription.

Qanoon always had a PDF download feature—while Decree didn’t—because the source of the text on Qanoon is a PDF published in the Official Gazette, and we offer this source PDF as a download to enable users to verify that the content they are reading on Qanoon is actually the same as the content that was published in the Official Gazette. For Decree, there is no source PDF to verify the accuracy of the content because we are the authors of the translation, and our process of creating and uploading the translation does not require the creation of a PDF file.

We have also been hesitant about offering PDFs due to the risks that they might impose to users as those who rely on PDFs might not be aware that a document has been amended or revised, not only when we revise the document to integrate new amendments, but also when we revise our translations to make them more coherent with the greater body of legislation we have on Decree.

However, we also fully understand that certain users prefer to read larger documents on paper, and we are also aware that in the normal course of the business of lawyers and legal advisors they would have to share the full-text version of a document with the person they are advising, and for this reason they need to have the legislation in an easy to share PDF format.

The PDF solution that we implemented does not require us to manually create a PDF, and instead generates one using the content already published on the website with additional metadata such as the date on which the document is downloaded, a hyperlink to the source page, and a hyperlink to any royal decrees or ministerial decisions referenced by the downloaded item. We hope that this information would encourage users to go back and verify that the item they are reading is up to date.

The PDF download feature is available to logged-in users on all Decree Legislation and Decree Intel documents, and the button is located at the end of each document.

You can test this featuring by logging into Decree and viewing any of our translated items.

In addition to the content of the Official Gazette, we launched in 2023 Decree Intel, a database of Omani legal research material developed in-house by our team that includes explanatory notes, entity overview reports, and summaries of Supreme Court cases and MJLA fatwas; we also added a brand new section for unpublished Circulars issued by the Central Bank of Oman and the Capital Market Authority; and we re-launched our Newsletter in a brand new format.

Qanoon also had major developments in 2023 as the website had its first major redesign since its launch in 2015, we also launched a new section for MJLA fatwas, and digitised hundreds of Supreme Court cases that are now fully searchable on Qanoon.

In the area of capacity building and community engagement, we collaborated with the Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs, Omantel, and Sultan Qaboos University to host a variety of events, including hosting the Middle East School of Internet Governance, an event that had never been hosted in Oman.

As we start the year 2024, we look forward to further serving the legal community in Oman and beyond. Stay tuned for announcements in the upcoming days on some projects planned for this year!

This change will increase the frequency at which you will receive emails from Decree. If you are happy with receiving monthly updates only and would not like to receive immediate royal decree alerts and weekly Official Gazette updates, you can configure your preferences using the links found at the bottom of any email sent by Decree.

If you have not subscribed to our free newsletter, you can do so using the button below:

Decree signed last week a memorandum of understanding with the Omani Lawyers Association (OLA) to cooperate in the fields of legal awareness and access to legislation. Under this MOU, Decree will collaborate with OLA in organising legal awareness events in Arabic and English, will provide special rates for subscribing to Decree to small Omani law firms not practising in association with a foreign law firm, and will provide members of OLA the opportunity to advertise on Qanoon.

The special Decree subscription rates offered to small Omani law firms under this MOU are available until the expiry of the MOU in August 2025.