Non-Ionising Radiation and the Gaps the Regulation Leaves

Two short articles that close a long instrument

Articles 98 and 99 are the last two articles of the Executive Regulation, and between them they occupy about four lines. They are also, in a quiet way, two of the most consequential articles in it, because they both deal with what the Regulation does not say. Article 98 deals with a whole field it does not cover. Article 99 deals with every other silence in it.

That is a useful thing to notice about the architecture of the instrument. Ninety-seven articles have set out licensing, dose limits, workers, the public, medical exposure, source safety, transport and waste - all of it about ionising radiation. The drafter then wrote one article acknowledging that non-ionising radiation also exists and needs its own instrument, and one article saying that where this Regulation is silent, international standards apply. A reader who stops at Article 97 has read the rules; a reader who reads these two has understood the boundaries of the rules.

With these two articles this series completes its reading of the Executive Regulation 4/2003 from Article 1 to Article 99. Nothing about that changes what either article says, and neither of them is a summary of the instrument - Article 99 in particular is a rule of application, not a conclusion.

Article 98: a mandate with a deadline, and no exposure limit in it

Article 98 is headed non-ionising radiation and it is one sentence. The President issues the instructions for protection against non-ionising radiation, on the recommendation of the Committee, within a period not exceeding two years from the date this Regulation came into force.

The structure is the one the series has met twice already - in the transport chapter and at the second paragraph of Article 97 for decontamination - and the same warning applies with more force here, because the subject is wider. There is no exposure limit in Article 98. There is no frequency range in it, no list of covered equipment, no measurement method and no duty on a licensee. It is an instruction to the President to issue an instrument, and the substance is in that instrument. Any statement of the form "Regulation 4/2003 sets a limit for electromagnetic field exposure" is false on its face.

What is unusual about this article, and worth dwelling on for a moment, is that it carries a deadline running against the authority rather than against the licensee. Within a period not exceeding two years from the date this Regulation comes into force. Almost every other deadline in the instrument runs against the regulated party - thirty days before commencing work in Article 83, fifteen days from the end of each year in Article 96, twenty-four hours for an over-limit release. This one runs the other way.

The Institute will not draw a legal conclusion from that, and a reader should be careful of summaries that do. Whether the two-year period was met, and what follows if an instrument was issued later, are questions about instruments and dates rather than about this article, and they are questions for the Ministry and for a lawyer. What the article does settle is where to look: the content is in a decision of the President, issued on the recommendation of the Committee.

What a facility should actually do about non-ionising radiation

The practical question behind this article is almost never about the law. It is that non-ionising sources are everywhere in the same buildings that hold ionising ones, and the people responsible for one are routinely asked about the other. Magnetic resonance imaging, shortwave or microwave diathermy and therapeutic ultrasound - acoustic rather than electromagnetic, and grouped with these by practice rather than by physics - in a hospital; ultraviolet curing of inks and coatings, and laser cutting, in industry; radiofrequency welders and induction heaters on a plant floor; broadcast and telecommunication antennas on a roof; and lasers in a research laboratory. None of those is governed by the ninety-seven articles that precede this one.

Three things follow for a radiation protection officer, and they are the Institute's recommendations rather than requirements of Article 98, which imposes no duty on a licensee at all. First, ask the Ministry which instrument governs each of your non-ionising hazards today and keep each with the licence file, because they are not all in one place: an instrument written for electromagnetic fields is drawn on fields up to the microwave range, and neither optical radiation from a laser nor therapeutic ultrasound, which is acoustic and not electromagnetic at all, falls inside it. In the Institute's library the instrument on electromagnetic fields is Decision 116 of 2013, and as with transport and decontamination the instrument in force is what binds and it is amended independently of this Regulation. Second, keep the two programmes separate in your documentation, because conflating them is how a facility ends up citing an ionising provision for a non-ionising hazard in front of an inspector. Third, be clear in writing about which hazards your radiation protection officer is appointed for, since the Regulation appoints officers under an instrument whose subject is ionising radiation.

One boundary of the Institute's own work belongs here, because this is the article where people ask for it. The Institute trains and advises. Measurement of electromagnetic field strength, laser hazard assessment including the nominal ocular hazard distance, classification measurement where the manufacturer's labelling is absent or the device has been modified, and any survey of a non-ionising source are field and laboratory work, carried out through specialist partners; the Institute does not carry out laboratory analysis, instrument calibration or equipment testing in this area any more than in the ionising one.

Article 99: the residual rule, and the words that limit it

Article 99 is headed matters for which there is no provision, and it closes the Regulation. It makes the standards of the international agencies and organisations - it names the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation as examples - apply in whatever this Regulation does not provide for.

The first clause is the whole limit: in what is not provided for in this Regulation. This is a residual rule, not a general incorporation. International standards fill silences; they do not displace provisions. So where the Regulation has spoken, it governs, even if an international standard would be read differently - and this is the misuse of Article 99 that the Institute meets most often in practice, in both directions.

Take a concrete case the series has already met. Article 87 classifies waste and gives, for the alpha limb of class 3, an alpha activity of less than 400 becquerels per gram and a total activity not exceeding 4000 becquerels per package. A reader should notice that the two figures as the Regulation states them do not sit together arithmetically: a package at 400 becquerels per gram reaches 4000 becquerels in total at about ten grams, so on any realistic package mass the two conditions cannot both be met. The Institute does not read a figure into the instrument that it does not contain and does not correct it here; a facility whose classification turns on this should put the stream, the mass and both figures to the Ministry in writing and keep the answer. Whether an international scheme would classify the same stream the same way is beside the point. Article 99 does not authorise a facility to substitute the international scheme, because Article 87 is not a silence: the Regulation has provided for the classification of waste, and what it provides is what applies. Where Article 99 does bite on that same subject is a different question - for example a technique for characterising a waste stream, on which the Regulation says nothing at all.

The second limitation is in the words that follow: the standards issued by. What Article 99 brings in is standards, issued by international agencies and organisations. That is narrower than it looks. The international bodies publish a great deal that is not a standard - guides, technical reports, safety reports, training material, conference proceedings. In the Institute's view, and this is our reading rather than the text, a facility invoking Article 99 should be able to say which document it is relying on and why that document is a standard, because a reference to a body rather than to a document is not a reference at all. The article names two bodies as examples, with the word such as, so the list is open and other international bodies are not excluded.

Using the residual rule without getting it wrong

Article 99 goes wrong in two opposite directions, and both are common enough to name. The first is over-reach: a facility or a consultant that prefers an international treatment of a subject cites Article 99 and applies it over an express provision. That is not what the article says, and in front of an inspector it is a weaker position than simply complying with the Regulation, because the Regulation is the instrument the inspector is enforcing.

The second is under-reach, and it is the more damaging of the two in practice. A facility meets a question the Regulation does not answer - how to characterise a stream, how to identify and model the exposed human groups - Article 90 item 2 requires the monitoring to demonstrate compliance with the permitted exposure of human groups, but prescribes no method for identifying them, and the international treatment of this has itself moved from the critical group to the representative person - what a conditioned waste package should look like, how to structure a dose record - and concludes that because the Regulation is silent there is no obligation. Article 99 says the opposite. The silence is filled, and it is filled by the standards of the international agencies and organisations. In the Institute's view, this is the article that most often answers the question "what exactly am I supposed to do here", and it is the least used.

Two notes on using it in a file. The first is that the naming of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organisation is by way of example, introduced by such as, so the article does not restrict itself to those two; other international agencies and organisations are within it. The second is that the article is drawn on standards issued by international bodies, and a foreign national regulator is not one of those - a facility that wants to rely on another country's regulatory guidance is not relying on Article 99 and should say so, and the earlier batches of this series recorded a related point: this series does not assert what the law of other states says.

A closing word on how the two articles sit together, since they are the last two. Article 98 points outward to an instrument that had to be issued. Article 99 points outward to standards that apply where nothing was. Both are reminders that this Regulation was never meant to be read alone: the licence conditions, the Committee's values, the President's decisions on transport and decontamination and non-ionising protection, and the international standards behind the silences are all part of the same obligation. A licence file that contains only the Regulation contains the smaller half of what binds the facility.

Questions these articles get asked

How the Institute can help

These two articles produce two very different findings. On Article 98 the usual gap is a facility with significant non-ionising sources - an MRI suite, lasers, radiofrequency equipment - and no instrument in the file for them, because the radiation programme was built entirely from this Regulation. On Article 99 the gap is harder to see: decisions taken on points the Regulation does not address, with no stated basis anywhere in the file, which leaves a method that cannot be defended and cannot be checked by the independent checks Article 94 requires.

Radiation Protection Officer training that covers the Regulation end to end and the instruments it delegates to, advisory support in assembling the instruments your licence file is missing - transport, decontamination, non-ionising protection, clearance levels and discharge limits - help in writing a short stated-basis note for each point where the Regulation is silent and you had to decide a method, so that it sits properly under item 4 of Article 94, and a documentation review that separates your ionising and non-ionising programmes and states in writing which hazards each officer is appointed for. Measurement of electromagnetic field strength, laser classification measurements and any field survey come from specialist partners; the Institute does not carry out laboratory analysis, instrument calibration or equipment testing.

Scope of what the Institute does: training and consulting. Field radiation surveys are carried out through specialist partners. The Institute does not carry out laboratory analysis, instrument calibration or equipment testing.

A note on the authority named in the text. The Regulation says the Council, meaning the Supreme Council for the Environment and Natural Reserves. That body no longer exists. Competence today sits with the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change, and the unit concerned is named in the organisational decisions as the Radiation Protection Department. The word Council is kept where this explanation renders what the instrument itself says, because that is the instrument's own word; in the Institute's own advice it is written as the Ministry. Read Council as the Ministry throughout.

This explanation is published for awareness by the radiation protection team at ALDuha Institute for Training and Environmental Consulting. The English text is an explanation, not a certified translation: the Arabic text published in the Official Gazette governs in case of any difference, and the official Arabic wording of every article discussed here is quoted in full on the Arabic version of this article. This explanation is introductory. It is not a legal opinion, it does not replace the conditions of your own licence, and it does not replace review by the regulator. Last updated 4 October 2026.