Court rulings to be codified
Riyadh: Arab News A draft project to codify court verdicts has been submitted to the higher authorities for approval, a local daily reported yesterday.
“The Council of Senior Religious Scholars has submitted a project to codify and document the verdicts issued by the Kingdom’s Shariah courts for the consideration of the higher authorities after completing studies on the project,” Dean of the Faculty of Distant Education at Imam Muhammad bin Saud University Abdul Rahman Al-sanad, who is also professor of the Sheikh Saad Ghonaim Chair, told Al-watan newspaper.
Documenting court verdicts has been a topic under study at the Council of Senior Religious Scholars for a long time.
Al-sanad, who is also professor at the Department of Comparative Jurisprudence at the Higher Institute of Judiciary, said various Fiqh academies had also been studying the matter for the past several decades.
“The topic was studied again about one and a half years ago in detail and then a decision was made to permit documentation in view of its importance and codification to help judges to prepare verdicts on the basis of Shairah Laws,” he said.
He pointed out that the documentation would also help avoid instances of different judges making inconsistent judgments on identical cases.
He said there were instances of codification of Shariah judgments during the time of the early caliphs.
Apart from helping judges to avoid issuing different verdicts on identical issues, the documented verdicts will give an opportunity to the people to know in advance the nature of judgment they can expect in any dispute on the basis of past verdicts.
In 2007, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah allocated SR 7 billion for the development of legal facilities in the Kingdom.
The project also conducts studies on the developments in the legal world and examine them on the basis of Shariah texts with due consideration to social, psychological and security and economic factors.
The ministry increased the number of judges at some courts by 150 percent last year as part of its efforts to dispose of cases as quickly as possible.