Kuwait Court of Cassation principle number 92

Summary: - What is required for a paper to have official status: its author must be a public official competent to draw it up and confer official status upon it, or intervene in drawing it up or endorsing it in accordance with the laws, regulations, and instructions issued to him by his superior authority. - Criminal law has not laid down a specific definition of an official instrument or paper, whereas Article Eight of the Law of Evidence has defined it. The consequence: this definition must be adopted as to when such instruments acquire the value of private instruments. Rule: It is established that the criterion for a paper's official status is that its author be a public official competent by virtue of his office to draw it up and confer official status upon it, or intervene in drawing it up or endorsing it in accordance with the requirements of the laws, regulations, and instructions issued to him by his superior authority. The legislature has not laid down in the Penal Code a specific definition of an official instrument or paper. Whereas Article Eight of the Law of Evidence defined official instruments by providing that "Official papers are those in which a public official or a person entrusted with a public service records what was performed by him or received by him from the persons concerned, in accordance with the legal formalities and within the limits of his authority and competence. If such papers do not acquire official status, they shall have only the value of private instruments where the persons concerned have signed them with their signatures, seals, or fingerprints. This must be adopted so long as the Penal Code—as stated above—contains no definition of an official instrument. Accordingly, the instrument forming the subject of the offence of forgery is an instrument that possesses evidentiary force and to which the law attaches an effect. If the alteration was not introduced into an existing instrument possessing the elements required by law for it to be described as an official instrument, and it possesses no evidentiary force and produces no effect, the offence of forgery is absent for lack of a subject matter.