AMMAN — Head of the Jordanian Bar Association
(JBA) Yahya Abu Aboud said defense orders are no longer necessary, with
particular mention of Defense Order No. 28, which pertains to debtor
imprisonment.
اضافة اعلان
Defense orders were issued to help deal with the
COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences that rendered many people unable to pay
their debts, Abu Aboud told
Jordan News, but two years on, “no official
statistics appear to prove that debtors are committed to paying their debts to
creditors, and the latter are often now becoming debtors themselves”.
“This undermines trust in the legal system and
judicial decisions,” he stressed.
It is critical, therefore, to have alternatives to
these orders, as well as to partially “withdraw from them”, he said, adding
that extending the provisions of the penal decisions related to the
imprisonment of debtors and perpetrators of financial crimes is only postponing
the problem, not solving it, especially since debts continue to increase due to
the interest levied on them over time.
Abu Aboud said that “everyone in Jordan can be both
a creditor and a debtor at the same time, and this is what drives the Jordanian
economy”, adding that “business dealings are based on forward transactions
rather than cash”.
Because there are no alternatives to imprisoning
debtors, creditors will be unable to get their dues, and this is bound to make
people refrain from the present way of doing deals and turn to cash
transactions, which require cash liquidity that not everyone had, “especially
since the majority of Jordanians have low income”.
Abu Aboud said that the amended piece of legislation
No. 9 of 2022, which went into effect on Friday, addresses part of the issue
posed by the Defense Order No. 28; it states that those who owe a debt of less
than JD5,000 will not be imprisoned, while larger debtors face jail. The
duration of imprisonment, however, was reduced and debtors cannot be jailed for
more than 120 days.
MP Zaid Al-Otoum told
Jordan News that
“Jordan is a state of law”, and thus a return to normal life means a “return to
the original application of the text of the law without defense orders, which
are exceptional and no longer required after the pandemic has ended”.
Otoum argues that returning to the original wording
of the law protects both the creditor and the debtor, and that this stage must
be faced regardless of its intricacies in order for Jordanian economic life to
return to its previous era.
He added that if there is fear that once the defense
order is cancelled a significant number of debtors will go to jail, “there
should be a serious conversation about altering the law, not through defence
orders”.
Lawyer Lamees Sulaiman told
Jordan News that
when the curfew was imposed and shops were closed, in the period from March 18
to May 1, 2020, some courts decided that landlords would have to pay the rent
in full during the closing period, while others said that landlords and the
tenants would have to pay the rents, equally.
The Court of Cassation eventually resolved this
issue by charging the rents in full to the landlord during the closing period,
Suleiman said.
“It was also decided to postpone the imprisonment of
debtors owing less than JD100,000, meaning that if a judgment was issued
obligating any tenant to pay a sum totaling less than this amount and the
tenant did not pay it to the landlord, and did not offer a settlement, the
landlord could not request the imprisonment of the tenant until September 30,
2022,” she added.
Lawyer Amin Al-Khawaldeh told
Jordan News that the defense order constituted “an unprecedented breach between the two
parties to the contract (the landlord and the tenant), and this represented a
victory for one party at the expense of the other without taking into account
the difficult economic conditions that surrounded and afflicted everyone”.
“What is remarkable for us, as lawyers and
observers, is that most of these tenants, depending on the defense orders,
failed to pay their obligations,” he added.
“There are thousands of lawsuits and claims, without
the slightest initiative from the tenants to pay, sheltered by legal protection
under the current defense order, which upset the balance of justice, the rule
of law and the principles of justice and fairness,” he stressed.
Abdallah Tarabsheh, a landlord, told
Jordan News that “I had two apartments that I used for the purposes of leasing, but because
of the defense orders, the tenants did not pay the rent, and due to the current
circumstances they also lost their jobs, which made me bear the circumstances
with them and as a result I exempted them from paying the rent for more than
four months”.
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