Mapping Saudi Criminal Law

This Article maps the criminal law system in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia enacted a criminal procedure code in 2001, but it lacks a comprehensive penal code, relying instead on (i) identifications of certain acts as violations of the law (from public behavior to matters of the state administrative cogwheel) scattered in various pieces of legislation and (ii) the classical Islamic legal tradition’s classification forming a criminal Islamic common law which is organized into (a) “set punishment” prescribed crimes (hadd, plural hudud), (b) crimes left to the court’s discretion (ta‘zir), and (c) two other forms of “violations of the body” with their own legal regime (qisas/retaliation and diya/blood money). The Article is based on extensive case law released by the Saudi Ministry of Justice.