Iraqi Legal Database

The Iraqi Legal Database (ILD) is the first comprehensive and electronic legal database to be created in the Arab region. The project to create the ILD was launched in 2004 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), through its Programme on Governance in the Arab Region (POGAR), and is being implemented in coordination with the Higher Judicial Council.

The objective behind the project is to make the entire corpus of Iraqi law available to judges, lawyers, academics, lawmakers, and all other individuals or institutions that rely on legal knowledge in a single, freely accessible source. In keeping with this objective, the ILD was published online in September 2008, and makes available to users 27,433 legal texts altogether, including 7,136 laws, 4,265 ministerial instructions, 3,268 regulations, 5,029 declarations, etc., which is to say every single Iraqi legal text that has been passed since 1917. The ILD is entirely free-of-charge and does not require users to subscribe in any way. The Iraq Country Office of the United Nations Development Programme is the source of most of the funding for the ILD.

The ILD is available only in Arabic. Iraqi law was not translated into any other language in a systematic manner, and so therefore legal researchers and other jurists that are interested in Iraqi law must carry out their research in Arabic. Non-Arabic speaking researchers who are interested in learning more about the ILD’s features may download the following powerpoint presentation which illustrates (and translates into English) the ILD’s various functions.