A nation's laws, the aphorism goes, are no more than an attempt to capture what the majority of its right-thinking citizens believe is reasonable behaviour. By that standard, the call for judicial reforms made by Chief Justice Saeed Abdul Baseer, head of Abu Dhabi's Criminal Court of First Instance, is well overdue because while UAE society has undergone fundamental change in recent decades, its laws have not always kept up.
The primary example he provided – of murder charges, where a blood relative of the victim has to be contacted to seek their views on whether they seek the death penalty, will accept blood money or even pardon the offender – illustrates the point perfectly. In traditional Emirati society in the pre-oil era, when there were few outsiders, a blood relative would be easy to find and their views would be canvassed and taken into account, leading to an outcome in which the wider community felt it had been involved. In small communities, this dynamic is at the heart of justice.
In 2013, with eight million residents and Emiratis vastly outnumbered by expatriate workers, that is no longer the case. What that means is more than a dozen accused murderers whose victims were from the developing world are stuck in legal limbo because blood relatives cannot be located. Few right-thinking citizens would describe that as justice. There are similar anomalies that reflected the community’s views at the time the laws were written but which have been rendered out of date by the evolution of UAE society.
Equally important is for the procedures through which the laws are applied to also keep pace with changes both in society and in technology. This too has been identified by Mr Abdul Baseer for attention, citing the example of the distinct and separate roles of the police and the prosecution, the blurring of which can render prosecutions invalid, allowing the guilty to walk free.
What does not need attention, and which remains at the heart of the legal system in the UAE, is the judges’ use of their discretion to determine what is just in the circumstances of each case. There is always a temptation, in the face of vastly differing sentences for what seem like similar offences, to restrict the sentencing range.
But that is to misunderstand the ultimate role of judges, which is to play the role of the right-thinking citizen assessing what is just in any given circumstance.
