Moot Court, Real Stakes: Jordan’s Future Lawyers Tackle Digital Violence Against Women and Girls
For two days in April, law students from 10 Jordanian universities argued the same fictional case — and the Ministry of Justice was watching.
The Ministry of Justice’s Dr. Walid Kanakriyeh opened the moot court exercise.
Something quietly significant happened at the Geneva Hotel in Amman on April 8 and 9. Law students from across Jordan gathered to argue a case involving a fake Instagram account, WhatsApp threats, digital blackmail, and the legal weight of a screenshot.
That much is familiar territory for a moot court. Jordanian law faculties have long used courtroom simulations to help students bridge theory and practice. The Ministry of Justice has also supported academic legal simulations across the country.
What was different was the subject of the case. For the first time, the Ministry formally supported a moot court built specifically around cybercrime — in this instance, technology-facilitated gender-based violence. When the Ministry’s Secretary-General for Judicial Affairs, Dr. Walid Kanakriyeh, opened the proceedings, this was more than an institutional courtesy.
Digital violence against women is no longer a niche topic at the margins of legal education. It is a growing justice issue, shaped by complex evidence, social stigma, and real barriers to reporting. To serve survivors well, lawyers need to understand the law, but also what victims face before they enter a courtroom.
That was the purpose of this national moot court: to give the next generation of legal practitioners a place to test arguments, sharpen their reasoning, and see how digital violence cases become complicated under pressure.
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The case: Sarah
All 10 universities argued the same fictional case.
Law students from 10 universities argued both sides of a difficult case.
Sarah Khaled, 24, discovers a fake Instagram account in her name posting defamatory content and sharing a private conversation. Soon after, threatening WhatsApp messages come in, demanding 2,500 dinars and a public apology. The accused: Raed Sami, 27, a digital marketer whose contract with Sarah’s organization had recently been terminated.
The prosecution had to prove, under Jordan’s Cybercrime Law No. 17 (2023), that Raed created the account, attempted to access Sarah’s real accounts without authorization, and engaged in blackmail. The defence had to dismantle that chain. Was an IP address enough to prove responsibility on a shared office network? Did damaging online content automatically meet the threshold for criminal defamation? Could screenshots, messages, and other digital traces establish the facts clearly enough for a court?
The case was designed to be genuinely hard — because real digital-violence cases often are.
Inside the courtroom
The competition ran across two days and 10 sessions. Teams came from universities across the country. Jubilee School in Amman also attended, showing that interest in this kind of applied legal learning extends beyond university walls.
⚖️ Al Al-Bayt University
⚖️ Al-Isra University
⚖️ Amman Arab University
⚖️ Islamic Sciences University
⚖️ Middle East University
⚖️ Mutah University
⚖️ Philadelphia University
⚖️ University of Jordan
⚖️ Yarmouk University
⚖️ Zarqa University
After the opening ceremony and formal remarks, organizers conducted a public draw to determine the team pairings for each day. The randomness was deliberate. Each team had to be ready to argue either side, testing their grasp of the law, the evidence, and opposing arguments.
Sessions ran back-to-back, with each prosecution team facing a different defence. By the end, every team had faced questions and challenges from a panel of legal professionals and academics. Students were assessed on legal characterization, oral advocacy, procedural knowledge, and their handling of digital evidence.
There was a moment that perfectly captured the spirit of the exercise. During one session, the prosecution team was seen vigorously taking notes on the defence’s points — not to rebut them, they explained later, but to learn from them. The competition had created conditions where even losing an argument could mean gaining something.
What students learned under pressure
The learning was not abstract. It was practical and intense. Students and faculty described an experience that changed how they understood the law, digital evidence, and the realities victims face.
Dr. Abeer Al-brim, a faculty member from Al-Isra University, reflected on what she witnessed:
“Our students gave everything to this experience — not just their time, but their effort. They weren’t worried about the result. They were worried about the experience itself. That’s what made me feel proud in front of my colleagues.”
Usayed, a student-judge from Yarmouk University, described what the case opened up for him:
“I learned that digital violence can happen in any way imaginable. The perpetrator here, because he was clever, committed the crime from his workplace to avoid suspicion. That’s what makes digital violence so serious.”
A third-year student from the University of Jordan put it plainly:
“Beyond legal skills, this experience gave me a much deeper understanding of the difficulties women face when dealing with cyberbullying, defamation, and electronic blackmail. Now I feel genuinely ready to argue a real cybercrime case for a real person.”
For some students, the impact was very personal. One participant from Al Al-Bayt University described the experience as a moment of self-recognition: “I discovered my personality at a deeper level, and confirmed my ability to practice law and how genuinely interested I am in it.” Another said her biggest challenge was standing before the panel for the first time — an anxiety she linked directly to how little practical courtroom experience her university studies had offered.
A participant survey suggested those reflections were widely shared: most students rated the experience as very useful, said it deepened their awareness of digital violence and digital rights, and reported greater confidence in defending survivors. And that movement from awareness to confidence was exactly the point. The exercise forced students to use the law, defend it, question evidence, and think through what happens when digital harm becomes a legal case.
Dr. Hashim Al-Ali, a civil law faculty member from Zarqa Private University, described the effect of that pressure on his students:
“When committee members started flagging precise details — small things we hadn’t expected at that level of specificity — students went home and opened the Cybercrime Law. They told me: ‘We thought we knew this. We didn’t know it at this depth.’ That’s what this court did: it put them inside the law.”
He added that when he arrived at work the next day, students were already waiting for him, asking when they could start preparing for the next competition.
What the case exposed
Not every reflection was celebratory. Faculty members noted that legal education in Jordan more often now includes a standalone course on cybercrime. But a course alone, taught in conditions that vary by semester and classroom, cannot replicate what a live simulation forces a student to do. As one faculty member put it:
“A course on cybercrime exists. But that course lives inside a timetable, inside a classroom, inside whatever conditions that semester brings. What we need are moot courts that specialise in these topics built into university programmes regularly, not as one-off events.”
The case made the legal challenges concrete. Students had to confront the difficulty of digital proof, the breadth of some provisions in the Cybercrime Law, and the limited number of Court of Cassation rulings interpreting that 2023 law. They are the kinds of questions practising lawyers will face when digital violence cases move into real proceedings.
The case also opened conversations that reached beyond legal procedure. A student from Middle East University noted the social barriers that shape whether victims can use the legal system at all:
“Some victims are held back by fear — fear of what will be said, fear of how their reputation will be perceived, fear of family reaction. They become victims twice over. The legal pathway exists. But knowing it exists isn’t the same as being able to use it.”
That insight matters. Digital violence cases do not begin in court. They often begin with shame, isolation, threats, family pressure, uncertainty, and fear of what reporting may bring. A legal pathway can exist on paper while still feeling inaccessible to the person who needs it.
The moot court is part of our IDRC-funded “ecosystems of support” pilot in Jordan and Iraq — implemented with local partners, including Jordan’s Information and Research Center (King Hussein Foundation). The premise: digital GBV survivors need more than one door into support. The goal: improve and connect legal, education, health, and governance responses so survivors are not left to navigate fragmented pathways alone.
Within that ecosystem, the moot court strengthens legal readiness through education. It helps future lawyers practice the arguments these cases require, while learning to recognize the survivor realities behind real files, proceedings, and decisions.
A model that can travel
The competition was designed to be replicable: no special facilities, no external faculty, no infrastructure that only a well-resourced institution could sustain. The case of Sarah Khaled, the public draw, the panel structure — these are components that any university with a law faculty could adapt and run.
The Ministry of Justice’s support does not change that. It amplifies it.
Moot courts have existed in Jordanian legal education for years. What changed in April 2026 was that the Ministry stood formally behind one focused on digital violence against women. That decision signals that this violence is not only a civil society concern or academic topic. It is a legal reality that the justice system has an interest in preparing practitioners to handle.
In short: when a law student argues a digital-violence case before a panel of legal professionals, in a competition opened by the Ministry of Justice, the exercise becomes more than an educational simulation. It becomes a statement about what the profession now requires.
What comes next
A first moot court exercise had already been staged quietly last October 22. This second one expanded on that: from five universities to 10, from one day to two, and from a student exercise to a national competition. The format holds. The question now is how broadly it can travel.
After the second day, teams were formally recognized for their participation. Mutah University was named the winner of the competition. Dr. Abedelelah Al-Nawaiseh, Dean of Law, said the victory reflected his faculty’s “commitment to providing a learning environment that brings together theoretical knowledge and practical application.”
But the larger achievement was a shared one. When the next generation of Jordanian lawyers encounters a digital-violence case, they will be better prepared. They have already stood up, argued both sides of a case that looked clean on paper and grew complicated under questioning, and walked away knowing something they did not know when they arrived.
Caught on camera…
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