Category: Announcements

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.

As requested by some of our users, we are making changes to our newsletter to provide subscribers of our free newsletter with new royal decree alerts and weekly updates on the content of the Official Gazette as soon as they are available.

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.

We are delighted to announce that Decree will be co-hosting, along with Sultan Qaboos University, the Middle East School on Internet Governance (MEAC-SIG). This event is organised by ICANN, the Internet Society, and RIPE NCC. It will take place in Muscat for the very first time in December 2023.

MEAC-SIG is a unique hybrid course on internet governance targeting lawyers, techies, and policymakers from various sectors including the government, private sector, academia, the technical community, and civil society. It covers a range of internet governance topics, encompassing both policy and technical aspects. In addition to providing an overview of how the internet functions, this year’s MEAC-SIG will also cover geopolitics and internet governance, internet public policy, internet fragmentation, human rights, cybersecurity and encryption, privacy and data protection, as well as content regulation.

MEAC-SIG this year will be conducted in a hybrid format where online sessions will be conducted in October and November 2023, followed by a 3-day in-person event in Muscat in December where participants who successfully complete the online course from across the Middle East and adjoining countries will come to Muscat.

MEAC-SIG will be conducted exclusively in English.

We are delighted to have contributed to bringing this exceptional course to Oman, and hope to see many of you register to participate in this event.

The participants of the programme will be selected on the basis of their background with a view to maximizing the diversity of the participants. Only individuals who successfully complete the online component of the course will receive invitations to attend the offline component taking place in December.

Applications for MEAC-SIG will close on 3 September 2023. For more information and the application link, please visit the MEAC-SIG website.

We are delighted to announce today the launch of Decree Intel—a database of original Omani legal research material developed in-house by Decree that provides explanatory notes, overview of government entities, and summaries of Supreme Court cases and MJLA Fatwas.

Just over a year ago, we launched the beta version of Decree to create a definitive English language resource for Omani royal decrees, laws, ministerial decisions, regulations, and treaties. This month, Decree has turned one, and to celebrate this occasion, I thought it would be appropriate to share a progress report that showcases the considerable amount of content we have made available during the course of 2022, as well as mentioning our ambitions for 2023.

As previously announced, starting January 2023, Decree will graduate out of its beta phase and will become available as a paid subscription service.

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.

It has been less than eight months since Decree was launched, and it has already become the definitive source for accessing Omani laws and royal decrees in English. However, even though Decree is the biggest English language index and repository of Omani legislation available anywhere, the reality remains that Decree has only provided access to a portion of Omani legislation, namely, primary legislation in the form of royal decrees and laws.

As our users are fully aware, primary legislation provides only the general legal principles of the law, while the technical details are found in secondary legislation issued through ministerial decisions. These decisions are issued separately from royal decrees and at a later time.

Today, we are taking the first step at addressing this gap in our content by launching a complete English language index of all ministerial decisions published in the Official Gazette from 1972 onwards, which brings up the total of titles found on Decree to over 9,000 royal decrees, ministerial decisions, and treaties.

At this moment, the ministerial decisions section of Decree is merely an index that provides access to the original Arabic version along with a machine translated version generated using Google Translate service. This, of course, is only a temporary situation as we experiment with translating key ministerial decisions as they come out, and hopefully eventually provide a full translation of all new ministerial decisions immediately upon their publication.

You can navigate our ministerial decisions index by browsing the Ministerial Decision Section, by using Decree’s search engine, and by navigating through the tags found under each ministerial decision.

We are launching on Decree today a new section for publishing the full text of treaties ratified by royal decree. 

In Oman, treaties obtain the power of law upon their ratification by royal decree and become directly applicable in a manner identical to domestic legislation. Therefore, they are key legislative instruments that all legal professionals need to access. 

The treaties section on Decree is identical to the treaties section on Qanoon, and has over 600 bilateral and multilateral treaties that Oman has ratified from 1974 onwards in the area of taxation, free trade, investment, environment, human rights, and all other aspects of life.

Treaties uploaded to Decree are tagged by counterparty and topic. This will enable our users to easily view all the treaties signed with, for example, the United Kingdom, or view all the treaties signed in the area of, for example, avoidance of double taxation.

You can also browse all the treaties available on Decree by using the brand new Browse button found on the main page of Decree.