Category: Announcements

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.

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.