About Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya

Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya

Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya, in Arabic al-Waqa'i' al-'Iraqiyah and in English the Official Gazette of Iraq, is the official gazette of Iraq, published in Baghdad. It has been the official source for the laws and resolutions passed by Iraq's parliament since August 1922, and it is published by the Ministry of Justice. Unlike an ordinary newspaper, the gazette does not exist to report or comment on events: its publication is itself a legal act, because under Article 125 of the Iraqi constitution laws are published in the Official Gazette and take effect on the date of their publication, unless a law stipulates otherwise. For more than a century, through the monarchy, the republican regimes that followed and the post-2003 order, the appearance of a text in Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya has been the point at which that text becomes binding law in Iraq.

Origins in 1922

The gazette dates from August 1922, in the earliest years of the Iraqi state, when the country was under the British mandate and the first Iraqi government and monarchy were being constructed. A national legislature requires an authoritative channel through which its enactments are promulgated, and the gazette filled that role from the beginning: it is recorded as the official source for laws and resolutions of the Iraqi parliament from August 1922 onwards. Its Arabic title follows the established Ottoman and Arab convention for official journals — al-Waqa'i', meaning the events or official record — the same convention used by the Egyptian official journal Al-Waqa'i' al-Misriyya. From its origins the gazette was a Baghdad publication, produced by the government of Iraq, and its issues were numbered in a continuous sequence that allows laws to be cited by gazette issue and date, a practice that Iraqi legal research still depends on.

Constitutional role under Article 125

The gazette's importance rests on a rule stated in the present Iraqi constitution. Article 125 provides that laws shall be published in the Official Gazette and shall take effect on the date of their publication, unless stipulated otherwise. Publication is therefore not a formality added after a law is made; it is the trigger for the law's entry into force. Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council has discussed the same structure in explaining that the constitution requires laws to be published in the Official Gazette so that they come into effect from the date of their publication unless they provide otherwise, and that a dedicated Publication Law obliges the Ministry of Justice to issue the Official Gazette and specifies what is published in it. The same discussion notes that the internal rules of the Federal Supreme Court require the publication in the gazette of court decisions that explicitly declare laws or regulations unconstitutional, so that the gazette carries not only legislation but also the decisions by which legislation is struck down.

What the gazette publishes

The contents of Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya are defined by its function, and surviving files show their range. A Qatar Digital Library file of the Iraq Government Gazette covering January to April 1945 and March to May 1947 records that the copies were weekly issues published in Baghdad, and that they included copies of royal iradas, or decrees, and government notifications, regulations and proclamations issued by the ministries of Defence, Justice, Communication and Works, Finance, Education, Social Affairs, Economics and Supply. The same file records that the gazette carried Iraq Currency Board statements of coins and notes in circulation, and announcements for the registration of trademarks. An Iraqi Jewish Archive item preserves part of issue number 2271 and the beginning of issue 2272, from 1973, containing Law 87 of 1973 amending the Unified Labour Code, a decision on the Agrarian Reform Law, instructions amending the Agricultural Council instructions, Law 89 of 1973 amending the tobacco law, and Law 44 of 1973 on borrowing and issuing treasury bonds, together with government announcements and lists of political appointees and retirees across ministries. Laws, decrees, regulations, appointments, financial statements and official notices — that mixture, published in Arabic, is the gazette's characteristic content across the decades.

Publisher and issuing authority over time

Although the gazette is today a Ministry of Justice publication, the issuing authority named on it has changed with Iraq's administrative history, and library cataloguing preserves part of that record. The Qatar Digital Library describes the 1945–1947 issues as published in Baghdad by the Directorate General of Propaganda of the Ministry of Interior, Government of Iraq. A Berkeley Law Library catalogue record for the English-language Iraq Gazette notes that it was issued by the Directorate General of Guidance and Broadcasting of the Ministry of Interior in the summer of 1955, then by the Ministry of Information and Guidance, then by the Ministry of Guidance in 1959, and by the Ministry of Culture and Information in 1969, as well as by the Ministry of Justice, and that the English gazette complements the Arabic Waqa'i' al-'Iraqiyah. The Iraqi Jewish Archive describes its 1973 printing as published by the Office of General Publicity. The pattern is consistent: the gazette belonged at different times to the state's information and propaganda apparatus before settling with the Ministry of Justice, which the Supreme Judicial Council's account of the Publication Law identifies as the ministry legally obliged to issue it.

Resumption after 2003

The upheaval of 2003 interrupted many Iraqi state functions, and the gazette's continuity through that period is itself documented. A GlobalSecurity account of the rebuilding of the Ministry of Justice records that the Ministry's Legal Gazette resumed publishing on 17 June 2003, that it contained all Coalition orders, regulations and related instruments, and that it had been published since the 1920s. That resumption mattered legally as well as symbolically: the orders of the Coalition Provisional Authority and the legislation of the successor Iraqi institutions needed the same authoritative publication channel that Iraqi law had used since 1922, and the gazette provided it. The gazette accordingly spans, without a change of identity, the mandate-era monarchy, the republic proclaimed in 1958, the Ba'athist period, the occupation administration of 2003–2004 and the constitutional order established by the 2005 constitution, whose Article 125 continues to make publication in its pages the moment a law takes effect.

The Iraqi Legal Database and digital access

In September 2008 the Iraqi Legal Database was launched by the United Nations Development Programme through its Programme on Governance in the Arab Region, providing a comprehensive database that made all Iraqi positive law freely available online, in Arabic. The database built on the gazette's record, because the gazette is the authoritative printed source from which the corpus of Iraqi law is assembled. Country-of-origin research guidance published by the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation directs researchers to the official gazette, al-Waqa'i' al-Iraqiya, on the website of the Iraqi Ministry of Justice, noting that the gazettes there are available chronologically and numbered, although the page has no search function, and to the Supreme Judicial Council's Iraqi legislation database, which claims to give access to all laws and decrees adopted in Iraq since 1918. In practice, therefore, the gazette now exists in two forms: the continuing official print publication of the Ministry of Justice in Baghdad, and the digital collections, official and institutional, through which its texts are consulted by lawyers, courts, researchers and asylum decision-makers around the world.

The gazette as an archival record

Because it has published continuously since 1922, the gazette is also one of the principal primary sources for modern Iraqi history. Historic editions are preserved in the Qatar Digital Library, whose files of the Iraq Government Gazette from 1945 and 1947 are drawn from British India Office records, and in the Iraqi Jewish Archive, which holds the 1973 issues described above among its Iraqi government materials. British official files repeatedly cite the gazette as their source for Iraqi legal developments, quoting, for example, that a grant of tribal jurisdiction powers was published in the Waqa'i' al-Iraqiya number 2266 of 19 March 1945, and that a further advertisement had been published in number 2273 of 23 April 1945. Such citations, made by administrators at the time, confirm the working reality behind the constitutional rule: to know what Iraqi law was, officials in and outside Iraq read Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya, and the issue number and date of the gazette served as the permanent reference for the act in question.

Significance

Al-Waqai'a al-Iraqiya is the oldest continuously authoritative publication of the Iraqi state, and its significance is legal rather than journalistic. Every Iraqi law, from the enactments of the mandate-era parliament to the legislation of the present Council of Representatives, passes through its pages, and Article 125 of the constitution makes that passage the condition of the law's effectiveness. Its recorded contents — royal decrees and republican laws, ministerial regulations, currency statements, trademark registrations, appointment lists — amount to the official diary of the Iraqi state, kept without interruption in purpose since August 1922. The Ministry of Justice continues to publish it in Baghdad, the Ministry makes its numbered issues available online, and the databases built upon it, from the Iraqi Legal Database of 2008 to the Supreme Judicial Council's legislation database, have made the gazette's century of texts the working foundation of Iraqi legal practice and research.