One of the hallmarks of King Abdullah’s tenure has been his effort to reform Saudi law. A big part of that has been aimed toward the codification of laws, that is, writing down what the law says and how its breaches should be punished. Doing so would avoid the unseemly instances where two people, found guilty of essentially the same crime, are punished in vastly different ways. I’ve been writing about this here for the past five years.

The most recent example of this is where a man convicted of practicing witchcraft/black magic received a prison sentence and flogging, while just a month earlier, a woman convicted of the same crime was executed.

Foreign Policy Magazine has a timely article addressing the issue of codification and why it is so hard to achieve in Saudi Arabia. It’s not impossible, but very difficult, the article concludes. The difficulty stems from the Saudi attitude and belief that law comes exclusively from God and mankind has narrow scope within which he can control or channel it. The article is well worth reading in full…

Why won’t Saudi Arabia write down its laws?
Nathan J. Brown

In 2007 and 2009 Saudi King Abdullah capped a decade of legal and judicial reforms in his country by reorganizing the judiciary and ordering that Saudi Arabia follow the step that virtually all other states in the region did long ago by codifying its laws — committing to paper a comprehensive compendium of the operative laws in the kingdom. Since that date, however, his order has been neither challenged nor implemented. Why is codification of law seen as such a dramatic step in Saudi Arabia? And why does the king seem incapable of making it happen?

Saudi kings devoted considerable attention in the first decade of the 21st century to remaking the judicial order. Initial steps taken were new procedure laws with new decrees insisting (with uncertain effectiveness) that courts follow prescribed rules in their operation — and making the courts, always ambivalent about the role of lawyers, friendlier to the legal profession. In the most recent moves, besides ordering codification, the king consolidated all sorts of quasi-judicial bodies that littered the legal framework of the kingdom, wrenched adjudication functions away from the Supreme Judicial Council (handing them to a newly created Supreme Court), and relieved the country’s highest-ranking judge, a pillar of the old order, from his office at the head of the system. The king’s steps were sufficiently dramatic — and the identity of the Saudi state so deeply enmeshed in claims to be fully Islamic, especially in its legal structure — that longtime Saudi legal scholar Frank E. Vogel, in “Saudi Arabia: Public, Civil, and Individual Shari`a in Law and Politics,” termed them “not a shot but a barrage across the bow of his partners in rule, the conservative religious establishment” and “clearly seismic events within the world of Saudi shari`a politics.”
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[Thanks to Talal for the pointer.]