Arab law

Arab law (Arabic: القانون العربي al-qānūn al-‘arabī) describes the legal system of the Arab Union, which is considered to fall within the realm of common law despite maintaining an officially pluralist system. Arab law is codified at the highest level by the 1999 constitution, which establishes a federation of coequal states sharing sovereignty with the federation under a republican system of government, and provides for the separation of government into three branches (executive, legislative and judicial) at the federal and republican (state) levels, as well as for a clear discretion of the responsibilities of the two levels and their areas of jurisdiction.

Legal codification also exists regarding criminal and civil law. The former is via the Criminal Code, a single code covering all republics equally which is enforced by both levels of government under a system which remains unambiguously common law in form due to the virtually universal use of precedent and case law in the application of the Criminal Code. It is in the latter case where either the federalist or pluralist aspect of Arab law comes into play: as guaranteed by the constitution, civil (that is, non-criminal) law, including but not limited to family law, contracts, torts and other civil wrongs, lawsuits, corporate law, property law and taxation is the jurisdiction of the republics, except where the relevant case affects two or more republics or the union as a whole, in which case the body of federal civil law is applied by the Appellate Court of the Arab Union (typically via a tribunal formed by this court specifically for hearing the case, as the Appellate Court directly hears only serious federal cases, which are virtually always criminal); this is the federalist aspect of civil law. The pluralist aspect comes into play via a constitutional amendment guaranteeing certain categories of civil law (namely, family law, torts and other civil wrongs, property law and contracts), wherein all affected parties belong to the same confessional community, be free to settle outside the secular judiciary within the applicable religious court or similar legal tradition (known as customary law. For example, an Alawite couple seeking divorce may choose to proceed in an Alawite Shura which applies Sharia, and a Maronite family seeking to sell their house to a fellow Maronite family may choose to formalise the sale under supervision of the local bishop appointed by the Syriac Maronite Church; in both examples all parties would have to be in agreement to settle the matter outside secular jurisdiction.