Saudi Arabia eyes personal status law with main focus on family and strengthening of bonds

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Justice is set to release the personal status draft law with the main focus on family and strengthening of bonds.

Speaking at the Saudi Family Forum 2021 on Sunday, Justice Minister Walid Al-Samaani said that the personal status draft law announced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman within the system of specialized legislation was based on several goals. The most important of these was a focus on family status, strengthening the family bond wherever possible and reducing the negative impact of separation.

Al-Samaani said that the project focused mainly on stressing a woman’s agreement to marriage, preserving her and her children’s financial and alimony rights, as well as other issues related to divorce requests.

During his participation at the forum, Al-Samaani said that many public policies, including the basic law of governance, had focused on empowering the family to achieve sustainable social development and overcome any challenges.

Saudi Vision 2030 also stipulates, in many of its programs and articles, strengthening the status of the family and striving to overcome all obstacles facing its members, he said.

The minister explained that one of the decisions that contributed to enhancing the sustainability and stability of the family was the amendment made in the executive regulations of the legal pleading system by adding a legal text that refers all personal status disputes to the reconciliation center to try to reconcile spouses.

Al-Samaani stressed that by applying this amendment, personal status disputes related to divorce, alimony and other issues decreased by more than 20 percent, and said he hoped this would drop further. On the development of procedural aspects in personal status disputes, he said that the establishment of the cases audit center contributed to a decrease in the duration of judicial sessions in personal status cases by more than 30 percent.

The goal of digital transformation in the Ministry of Justice was not just to enable service provision, he said, but to facilitate procedures, especially regarding the quality and nature of cases such as personal status ones. Filing cases from home or elsewhere had also enabled the judicial and relevant authorities, such as the Human Rights Commission, to exercise their role and assess the societal situation.

Al-Samaani said that the ministry had launched 120 electronic services and that judicial sessions did not stop during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 1.5 million sessions were held, more than 1 million rulings were issued through electronic litigation, and more than 3 million requests were submitted electronically.

He said that the Ministry of Justice had applied artificial intelligence techniques to their system. The first cases to which this was applied were personal status cases so that judicial authorities could predict 80 percent of the verdict in advance.