13 - Liability of Public Institutions in Middle Eastern Law

Summary

The report examines whether there is, under international law, a specific Middle Eastern concept of liability for public institutions. While a simple answer is 'no', considering that the Nation-State was unknown in the region for the pre-modern corpus to acknowledge a liability of public authority in the international realm, the chapter proceeds, by way of bricolage, to examine the forms of liability comprised under the three subsets of the question in the volume. It finds in the classical tradition significant attention to the accountability of government under Qur’an 17:34 and its interpretations; a socially stratified understanding of the public/private realm; and a sophisticated corpus in the law of obligations that unifies contracts and torts under a strict liability regime in domestic law.