Friday 15 / November / 2024
Muscat: Every Royal Decree issued in the Sultanate since the 1970s is now easily accessible online, thanks to the efforts of two lawyers who have created a searchable database.
Riyadh Al Balushi and Yousuf Al Busaidi decided to build the site after spotting a gap in the information available online.
“Qanoon.om is the only website on the internet that provides free access to all royal decrees that were issued by His Majesty Sultan Qaboos bin Said from the 70s until today. Royal Decrees regulate numerous matters that relate to society and the government in Oman.
“We all know that Royal Decrees are used to issue laws, but they also ratify international treaties that Oman joins, establish and abolish ministries, embassies and other government entities, appoint senior government officials, adopt the annual budget, approve oil concession agreements, and grant Omani nationality, too.
“These Royal Decrees are extremely important to lawyers, civil servants, academics, and even individuals,” Yousuf said.
Yousuf has over five years of experience as a lawyer in both the public and private sector and holds a law degree from the University of Hull and a master’s law degree in international commercial law from the University of Birmingham.
Riyadh has ten years of experience working as a government lawyer and graduated from Cardiff University, before gaining a master’s in IT law and commerce from the University of Southampton. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of London.
The idea of the project started when the duo used to work in the same government department a few years ago.
“We were frustrated by our inability to easily find the laws that we needed to do our job and we decided to create a solution to fulfil our own need to access the law.
“Later on, we realised that this issue of access to the law was a problem that was faced by everyone trying to find legal information in Oman, and not only lawyers, but all members of society, regardless of whether it was free or not.
“So we decided to make available all of the laws for free in an easily accessible manner that can be used by everyone, whether on their desktop or mobile devices.”
The process was not an easy one, and Riyadh and Yousuf had to scan tens of thousands of pages from these volumes, sort them into separate documents, tag them, type them, and label them in a systematic manner. This process took about two years to complete.
“For all recent Royal Decrees, we acquire the text of the Royal Decree - like everyone else - from the website of the Oman News Agency. We later verify this text and attach the formal PDF version of it by relying on the content of the Official Gazette that is published on Sunday every week on the website of the Ministry of Legal Affairs.”
The duo say that the project was only possible because the Omani copyright law exempts official documents, such as Royal Decrees, from copyright protection, and therefore anyone can copy them and redistribute them free of charge and without the need to seek permission from anyone.
“Of course, we also have to update the website regularly and we aim to publish any royal decree that gets issued within a few hours of its publication,”Yousuf added.
When designing the website, Yousuf and Riyadh wanted the laws to be available for free on the internet and to enable users to easily find the laws that they are looking for, as well as easily finding the content they are looking for within each and every law.
“It has also been very important for us to make sure that our website is accessible on mobile devices as the majority of people nowadays look up information on their phones and not necessarily on a desktop device. Our objective is to make all the laws on the website available in text format, he said.
Currently, all Royal Decrees from the year 1974 onwards are available on the website in PDF format and the young lawyers are continuously converting more and more of these PDFs into text format.
“Most of them requiring typing the whole Royal Decree and reviewing it meticulously, but for other ones we are using special tools and techniques to automate the process and make it quicker. Currently we have over 1,000 royal decrees available in text format and it will take us several months to convert the rest into text format.
Although the website is currently offered only in Arabic, there are plans to offer the same contents in English, but this can take some time.
“We do plan on translating the laws into English as we feel that it is important for non-Arabic speakers in Oman to know their rights and obligations under the law and we also believe that having the laws in English can help add confidence to investors who would like to come to Oman. However, we plan on working on the English section only after we finish all our plans for the Arabic section.”
Besides, the duo also has plans for numerous additions and new features for the website. “Having all Royal Decrees in English is one of our long term objectives, but we have not started in this part of the project yet.
“In addition to converting all of our Arabic PDFs into text format, we plan on adding a new section to the website in upcoming weeks that will include all secondary legislation (Ministerial Decisions) in PDF in Arabic. Thousands of these documents are not available on the internet at all and our website will be the only place to find them.”
Besides the above, the two also plan on adding a feature to display whether a royal decree or a ministerial decision is repealed or not, as well as a feature to display the final version of any law (i.e. the law with all of its amendments incorporated) in text.
Qanoon.om is a personal project by two individuals that it is not affiliated with any government organisation and not registered as a company or an NGO. It is worth mentioning that Qanoon.om is also one of the very first personal websites in Oman that use a Omani domain name (.om)
