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.
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Oman Pledges Net Zero
Back in June 2022, I had predicted that Oman would pledge to achieve net zero by 2050. What I had not predicted was how soon this pledge would come. As you have probably heard by now, Oman has, in the lead-up to COP 27, pledged to achieve net zero by 2050.
This is fantastic news—it demonstrates Oman’s commitments to the objectives of the Paris Agreement and will most certainly galvanise its government and the private sector towards achieving this goal. However, it is also a daunting task that requires a fundamental rethink on how we use energy. Oman will have to take many unprecedented steps to fulfil this laudable goal, so how does it go on about it?
Decree Monthly Digest is a summary of the most significant legislation issued in the previous month.
October was a relatively busy month on Decree as ten royal decrees were issued on a variety of topics ranging from the amendment of laws and ratification of treaties, to government restructuring and the approval of petroleum agreements.
The most significant royal decrees issued last month are arguably Royal Decree 68/2022 Amending Some Provisions of the Penal Law, which includes, among other things, the criminalisation of the act of insulting the wife and children of the Sultan, and Royal Decree 69/2022 Amending Some Provisions of the Criminal Procedure Law, which introduces a new procedure for obtaining the approval of the Council of Ministers as a pre-requisite for prosecuting ministers for criminal misconduct. Royal Decree 60/2022 was also a significant royal decree as it transferred the climate affairs competences of the Civil Aviation Authority to the Environment Authority. Other significant royal decrees include Royal Decree 61/2022 on Oman’s accession to the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, Royal Decree 66/2022 issuing a licence to Oman Technology Infrastructure Company to build and operate passive infrastructure for telecommunications towers, and Royal Decree 67/2022 approving the petroleum agreement between the Government of the Sultanate of Oman and Shell Integrated Gas Oman BV, Alizz Gas Development LLC, and Totalenergies EP Oman Block 11 SAS for Block 11.
This month also had several important ministerial decisions including Decision 456/2022 of the Tax Authority amending the Executive Regulation of the VAT Law, and Decision 164/202 of the Supreme Judicial Council determining the geographical jurisdiction of the administrative circuits in Muscat, Salalah and Sohar.
Decree Monthly Digest is a summary of the most significant legislation issued in the previous month.
Two royal decrees were issued in September as summarised below:
Licences in the telecom sector are granted by royal decree in accordance with the provisions of the Telecommunications Law. This royal decree granted Oman Towers a licence to build and operate the passive infrastructure of telecommunication towers—which is the first and only licence of its kind granted in Oman.
This royal decree introduced a number of amendments to the Executive Regulations of Royal Decree 5/81 Governing Governing the Usufruct of the Lands of the Sultanate of Oman, the most important of which is increasing the term of the right of usufruct of government land from 50 years to 99 years.
In addition to the royal decrees mentioned above, several ministerial decisions were issued last month, with the following decisions being some of the most significant:
This decision creates a new framework for obtaining permits to provide VoIP and video calling services in Oman, and it imposes a set of new conditions on the providers of such services including a requirement to retain all equipment and data centres physically in Oman.
This decision creates a new framework for granting usufruct right for the construction of private schools that sets maximum areas for the usufruct depending on the school type and the specific periods of usufruct for such uses.
The National Centre for Statistics and Information (NCSI) published last week the legal framework for the governance of public sector data in the form of a National Data Strategy. Even though the name does not sound like it, the National Data Strategy is a legal instrument equivalent to secondary level legislation exactly identical to a regulation issued by a ministerial decision. This legal instrument governs the whole life cycle of public sector data, provides a framework for the exchange and release of this data, and establishes a system for the designation of national base registries for key public sector datasets, among many other things. This post highlights some of the key concepts found in this strategy.
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.
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Decree Monthly Digest – July 2022
Decree Monthly Digest is a summary of the most significant royal decrees and laws issued in the previous month.
Two royal decrees were issued in July as summarised below:
Royal Decree 56/2022 Promulgating the System of the Oman Chamber of Commerce and Industry
OCCI’s new system replaces OCCI’s system of 2017 and introduces a number of changes including a new structure for the OCCI board of directors in which a number of seats is now reserved for elected representatives of companies listed on the Muscat Stock Exchange and one seat is reserved for an elected foreign investor resident in Oman.
Royal Decree 57/2022 Reorganising the Oman Human Rights Commission
This royal decree issued the first comprehensive system for governing the work of the Oman Human Rights Commission, which was established in 2008. The system sets the general framework of how the commission operates and explicitly states that its decisions are made by the majority vote of the representatives of civil society on the commission.
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Decree Monthly Digest – June 2022
Decree Monthly Digest is a summary of the most significant royal decrees and laws issued in the previous month.
The month of June was the busiest month this year so far in terms of royal decrees with 24 royal decrees issued in a single month covering a change in the membership of the Council of Ministers, a restructuring of the judiciary, the promulgation of two new laws, the amendment of three laws, and more. The highlights of these royal decrees are as follows:
The Omani judiciary had a major overhaul last week with Royal Decree 35/2022 which re-constituted the Supreme Judicial Council, abolished the administrative court, and brought the Public Prosecution under the supervision of the judiciary. This significant development is part of the efforts of Sultan Haitham to re-structure the Omani government, which had previously included a major restructuring of the executive branch of the government and has now addressed the judiciary.
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World Environment Day: Decarbonisation
Today is World Environment Day—a day dedicated to celebrating and raising awareness about the environment, so I thought I would write a bit about ‘decarbonisation’: what it is, why we need it, and how we can achieve it.