Fully Authoritarian
World’s Population
Population
HRF classifies Jordan as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, or Abdullah II, came to power as the country’s fourth king in 1999, and rules the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an absolute monarch. While citizens regularly participate in protests and elect the lower house of parliament, Abdullah II maintains direct control over all three branches of government and the coercive General Intelligence Directorate (GID), military, and police forces. Since countrywide reform protests in 2011, often considered part of the regional Arab Spring, the regime has increasingly expanded its repressive capacities through legal reform passed under the guise of liberalization, including through regular amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Law, Cybercrimes Law, and Penal Code that increasingly restrict managed forms of dissent in civic space.
Elections are a façade to the point where the mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Although Jordanians elect members of the lower house of parliament every four years and the mainstream opposition has won large blocs in recent elections, the king controls the executive government and appoints all 65 members of the upper house of parliament, who debate, amend, and approve legislation originating in the lower house. Despite the limited legislative power of elected MPs, the regime has systematically manipulated regulations before every election since at least 2007 and has abused the new regulations to disenfranchise and fractionalize the Islamic Action Front (IAF), Jordan’s mainstream opposition party.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since the passing of the Cybercrimes Law of 2015, the regime has taken measures to increasingly manipulate the media, limit civil society, and crack down on mass protest movements. In its attempts to tightly control the flow of information and discourse in the country, the regime has moved to silence major dissenting organizations such as the Teachers Union and the Muslim Brotherhood, and has shut down critical media, including the satirical site AlHudood in 2023 and Al-Yarmouk TV in 2024. The regime abuses expansive amendments to the Cybercrimes Law in 2023 to arrest thousands of people and widely employs tactics such as physical coercion, coerced confessions, threats to family members, enforced disappearance, administrative detention, and torture against journalists, activists, peaceful protesters, and online dissenters.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In addition to the authority to rule by decree, Abdullah II appoints the cabinet, who serve as the executive government, and all members of the more powerful house in the legislature, which ensures royal control over the promulgation and implementation of all laws. The king also appoints members of the higher courts and controls the judiciary through the royally-appointed Minister of Justice. The regime frequently abuses the Crime Prevention Law of 1954 to detain thousands of people by administrative order with limited judicial review, and the Anti-Terrorism and State Security Court Laws of 2014 to try civilians in separate, military-run State Security Courts. As a result, the courts rarely hold regime officials accountable or hear challenges to regime policies, and they frequently rubber-stamp politically-motivated charges against political opponents, journalists, activists, and critics.
Elections are a façade to the point where the mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. While Jordan’s mainstream opposition party, the IAF, was able to win the largest bloc in the 2024 election, the regime takes serious measures to skew the electoral playing field and deprive elected MPs of any independent authority to legislate. Among these measures, the regime abuses its control over the nominally independent Electoral Commission to target opposition parties and candidates and to otherwise manipulate electoral results in its favor.
The regime takes measures to target and disrupt the opposition despite the electoral and governing systems in Jordan already being rigged significantly in its favor. Jordanians elect members of the lower house of parliament at least every four years, and the IAF – Jordan’s most prominent opposition party – has won large blocs in recent elections, including winning the largest bloc of 31 seats in the 2024 election. However, the king appoints the executive government and the 65 members of the more powerful upper chamber of the legislature, the Senate, who debate, amend, and approve legislation originating in the lower house. As a result, the 138 elected members of the lower House of Representatives do not hold any authority to legislate without the approval of royal appointees. The regime further maintains unfair influence in the popularly elected chamber by gerrymandering electoral districts to grant more parliamentary seats to less populated, more rural districts that traditionally vote for loyalist candidates that support the monarchy, which disenfranchises large populations in urban districts such as Amman or Zarqa with high proportions of marginalized Jordanian citizens of Palestinian descent, who make up the majority of Jordan’s population and historically form the mainstream opposition to the regime.
The regime has engaged in systematic, significant electoral law manipulation and electoral fraud. It takes regular and systematic measures to maintain an unfair balance of power by modifying the constitution or electoral laws in the lead up to every election since at least 2007. Prior, elections were marred by widespread vote buying, fraud, and explicit regime interference. While reforms have made elections in Jordan appear fairer to international observers, the regime has become more strategic in its repression of electoral competition. In addition to gerrymandering districts, the regime changed the voting system from the single, non-transferable vote (SNTV) to an open list proportional representation system ahead of the 2016 elections and again reformed the voting system ahead of the 2024 elections to a hybrid, closed party and open list representation system with the Political Parties Law of 2022, which also codifies further electoral system changes for the planned 2028 and 2032 elections. Such frequent changes, often cast as democratizing reforms to increase the power or pluralism of parties in the government, disrupt the political organizing and campaigning strategies of opposition parties, who face different constituents, registration requirements, and campaign regulations during each election cycle.
The regime has systematically and seriously undermined independent electoral oversight. In an apparent liberalizing concession to the demands of protesters in 2011 for electoral oversight independent from the Ministry of the Interior, the regime created the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in 2012. Although the IEC ameliorated issues of vote-buying and voter fraud that racked past elections in the country, the regime has abused its power to appoint all members of the IEC to unfairly target the political opposition for alleged failure to comply with new regulations. For example, shortly after the passing of the Political Parties Law of 2022, which itself promised increased party power in electoral politics, the IEC unilaterally dissolved 19 of Jordan’s 45 political parties without seeking an order from the Court of First Instance as required by Article 35 of the law. Among the parties that faced forced closure was the Partnership and Salvation Party (PSP), a moderate opposition party founded in 2017 after the regime coerced its founders into becoming a separate legal entity from the IAF. At least 50 members of the PSP reported resigning after receiving threats from security and intelligence agencies, while a lawyer representing the party claims that hundreds of party members resigned after receiving similar threats. The IEC dissolved the party in 2023 for allegedly not meeting the threshold requirement of members under the new parties law, a decision that the Administrative Court of First Instance and the Supreme Administrative Court upheld ahead of the 2024 elections.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. While Jordanian citizens engage in a robust civil society and participate in regular protests, the regime takes a wide range of repressive measures to silence and preclude popular dissent. Journalists often face legal harassment from the regime amid a strictly censored media environment. Similarly, the regime has targeted dissenting organizations and protesters with legal challenges and intimidation, and has often resorted to repressive tactics such as unlawful detentions, armed raids, and police violence to shut down mobilized dissent.
The regime systematically and seriously intimidates and obstructs the work of dissenting actors through legal harassment and coercive force. The regime has abused its control over the legislature and executive government to pass a web of vague laws that criminalize dissenting speech, with punitive measures that may intimidate citizens into self-censorship. Anti-defamation and other vague statutes in the Press and Publications Law, the Penal Code, and the Cybercrimes Law criminalize critique of the regime, government institutions, and public discussion of politically sensitive topics. Furthermore, the regime’s coercive apparatus, consisting primarily of the GID and police forces, regularly surveil, intimidate, and detain citizens without judicial review, and harass the family members and social networks of prominent dissidents, which creates an environment of fear to speak about the regime and encourages widespread self-censorship in the public sphere. In a prominent case from May 2025, the regime abused the Cybercrimes Law to forcibly disappear and detain prominent activist and country leader of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Hamza Khade, for a series of social media posts that featured images of peaceful solidarity demonstrations and criticism of the regime’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza. A few months later, in July 2025, amid rising dissent against widespread coercive actions of GID agents that led to the death of protester Ahmed al-Ibrahim while under police custody in Al-Ramtha, security forces arrested prominent social media activist Ayman Aballi for publishing a video in which he criticized the regime’s silence on the widespread starvation of civilians in Gaza and its harsh crackdown on the peaceful expression of widely held disagreements with its policies.
The regime heavily manipulates media coverage in its favor. State-affiliated media dominate the market, and the regime oversees editorial appointments and licensing for journalists under the Press and Publications Law of 1998. The regime abuses gag orders, anti-defamation laws, and other vague statutes in the Cybercrimes Law and Penal Code to intimidate, detain, and incarcerate journalists who criticize regime policies or publish stories on contentious topics. In 2024, the regime arrested and detained investigative journalist Hiba Abu Taha on politically-motivated charges in two separate cases for “inciting discord and strife among members of society” and “targeting community peace and inciting violence” over two articles she published on politically-sensitive foreign policy issues in newspapers outside of Jordan. Courts sentenced Abu Taha to two years in prison and a fine of 5,000 JOD (approximately $7,000) and denied her bail or appeal. The regime also abuses these vague legal statutes to restrict digital space and limit access to information in the country. In 2023, the regime blocked access to AlHudood, a popular satirical news website, for mocking the crown prince’s lavish wedding and banned TikTok for widespread “misuse” of social media during the 2022 truckers’ movement against decreased fuel subsidies in Ma’an, which was not covered by Jordanian media.
The regime takes systematic measures to shut down major independent organizations that protest regime policy. In 2020, the regime arrested the head of the Teachers Union, Nasser Nawasreh, on incitement for a speech criticizing the executive government and disbanded the Union amid mass protests in Amman demanding higher pay. The regime further abused emergency laws initially passed to limit the spread of COVID-19 to detain 1,000 teachers who peacefully protested and arrested three journalists for breaking a nationwide gag order on the movement. Since 2015, the regime has also taken systematic steps to silence the largest dissenting movement in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has existed as one of the most prominent civil society movements in Jordan since 1946. In 2020, ahead of parliamentary elections, a court ordered the Muslim Brotherhood Association, a civil branch of the wider organization, to close for allegedly operating without a license under the requirements of the Law of Parties and Associations of 2014. In 2024, security officials raided and shut down the offices of Al-Yarmouk TV, a private broadcaster that operated in Jordan for 12 years and was affiliated with the IAF, a political wing associated with the wider organization, after intimidating and attempting to shut down the outlet multiple times. In 2025, just seven months after the IAF, Jordan’s most prominent opposition party, won a plurality of seats in the 2024 parliamentary elections, the monarchy declared the entire Muslim Brotherhood an illegal organization, raided its offices, and banned the promotion of its ideas.
The regime systematically represses dissenting protests that cross tacit red lines, such as those that critique the monarchy, insult key allies, occupy spaces for extended periods of time, originate from certain disenfranchised groups in society, or spread beyond the local governorate. When truck drivers in the Ma’an governorate went on strike and demonstrated against an increase in fuel prices and the cost of living crisis in 2022, they used TikTok to report news related to the protest across different regions in Jordan amid a complete lack of local media coverage. Taxi and public bus employees and shops in multiple cities across the country joined the strike, leading the regime to shut down the internet in Ma’an and Karak governorates and block access to TikTok throughout the entire country. After passing amendments to expand the Cybercrimes Law in 2023, the regime began to crack down more heavily on dissenting protests and journalists who cover them. For example, for two years following October 2023, Jordanians held weekly protests across the country in solidarity with Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza. During the first six months of the war, security officials arrested more than 1,500 people, and the GID detained thousands more protesters, coerced confessions, issued travel bans, and harassed the family members of participants in these peaceful demonstrations. Mass arrests and intimidation tactics have continued through the end of 2025, resulting in the extrajudicial administrative detention of more than 57,000 Jordanians within a two-year period.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In addition to direct control over state resources and the coercive military, intelligence, and police forces, the Hashemite monarchy maintains its control over all three branches of government by appointing the cabinet and prime minister, the upper house of parliament, and high-ranking judicial officials. Although institutions have at times challenged the regime, citizens face systematic abuse of civilian and extrajudicial court systems that rubber-stamp politically motivated charges and thus retain little recourse for holding the regime and its officials accountable.
The regime has systematically undermined institutional independence to the point that institutions fail to challenge the regime or hold officials accountable. Abdullah II rules as an absolute monarch, personally appointing the executive government, the upper house of the legislature, and members of the higher courts, and maintains direct control over the judiciary through the royally-appointed Minister of Justice. As a result, all legislation must be approved by regime-appointed Senators before being approved or vetoed by the king, and cases or issues challenging the regime are no longer brought or are frequently dismissed by the courts. In the few instances in which lower courts rule in favor of challenges to regime policies, higher courts almost always rule in favor of the regime’s appeal. For example, after the IEC dissolved the Partnership and Salvation Party in 2023, the Administrative Court of First Instance and the Supreme Administrative Court denied the party’s appeals despite the IEC holding no legal authority to dissolve political parties. Similarly, the regime arrested activist Khaled Al-Natour, a popular leader of demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, under the Cybercrimes Law in February 2024 for a social media post criticizing the regime’s foreign policy. Although he was the first Jordanian citizen to ever be acquitted in a freedom of opinion case shortly after his arrest, the regime appealed his acquittal, and a different court sentenced him to a 5,000 JOD (approximately $7,000) fine.
Courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly failed to check, or enabled, the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and to make the electoral process significantly skewed in its favor. The courts in Jordan regularly uphold politically-motivated charges against critics and dissenting organizations, such as popular journalist, playwright, and satirist Kamil Al-Zoubi who has been imprisoned ten times since 2014 on vague charges such as “undermining the regime,” “broadcasting false news,” “defaming an official body and inciting sedition,” and “harming the reputation of the State.” The regime has also used its consolidated control over the judiciary to fractionalize the mainstream opposition: ahead of the 2020 elections the Court of Cassation forced the regime’s most formidable political opponent to splinter by court order, targeting the Islamic Action Front by declaring the Muslim Brotherhood illegal, and authorizing the transfer of assets, including confiscated funds and buildings, to a newly formed association led by Brotherhood members closer to the regime. The regime claimed enforcement of the same 2020 court order in its legal reasoning for shutting down and banning the Muslim Brotherhood as an illegal organization in 2025.
Despite its control over the judicial system, the regime directs politically sensitive cases to separate, regime-controlled courts. Through unchecked use of the Crime Prevention Law of 1954, the regime arbitrarily detains thousands of people – one in five inmates in Jordanian prisons – by administrative order without judicial review and tries civilians in separate, military-run State Security Courts (SCC) under vague statutes in the Penal Code, the Counterterrorism Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, and Cybercrimes Law. Anas Al-Jamal, a street vendor in Jordan who is well-known for leading chants at protests, has been convicted and imprisoned by the SCC on multiple occasions under both the 2015 and 2023 Cybercrimes Laws for critical posts on social media. In May 2022, he was convicted of “disturbing relations with a foreign country” for a Facebook post critical of the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Jordan. In 2023, the SCC convicted him again under Article 24 of the Cybercrimes Law for “publishing the names or pictures of law enforcement officials online, or any information or news about them that may offend or harm” in social media posts that criticized regime crackdowns on protests against Israeli occupation of the Jordan River valley. Al-Jamal was released in January 2024 but still faces a court-ordered travel ban as of December 2025.
HRF classifies Jordan as ruled by a fully authoritarian regime.
King Abdullah bin Al-Hussein, or Abdullah II, came to power as the country’s fourth king in 1999, and rules the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an absolute monarch. While citizens regularly participate in protests and elect the lower house of parliament, Abdullah II maintains direct control over all three branches of government and the coercive General Intelligence Directorate (GID), military, and police forces. Since countrywide reform protests in 2011, often considered part of the regional Arab Spring, the regime has increasingly expanded its repressive capacities through legal reform passed under the guise of liberalization, including through regular amendments to the Anti-Terrorism Law, Cybercrimes Law, and Penal Code that increasingly restrict managed forms of dissent in civic space.
Elections are a façade to the point where the mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. Although Jordanians elect members of the lower house of parliament every four years and the mainstream opposition has won large blocs in recent elections, the king controls the executive government and appoints all 65 members of the upper house of parliament, who debate, amend, and approve legislation originating in the lower house. Despite the limited legislative power of elected MPs, the regime has systematically manipulated regulations before every election since at least 2007 and has abused the new regulations to disenfranchise and fractionalize the Islamic Action Front (IAF), Jordan’s mainstream opposition party.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. Since the passing of the Cybercrimes Law of 2015, the regime has taken measures to increasingly manipulate the media, limit civil society, and crack down on mass protest movements. In its attempts to tightly control the flow of information and discourse in the country, the regime has moved to silence major dissenting organizations such as the Teachers Union and the Muslim Brotherhood, and has shut down critical media, including the satirical site AlHudood in 2023 and Al-Yarmouk TV in 2024. The regime abuses expansive amendments to the Cybercrimes Law in 2023 to arrest thousands of people and widely employs tactics such as physical coercion, coerced confessions, threats to family members, enforced disappearance, administrative detention, and torture against journalists, activists, peaceful protesters, and online dissenters.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In addition to the authority to rule by decree, Abdullah II appoints the cabinet, who serve as the executive government, and all members of the more powerful house in the legislature, which ensures royal control over the promulgation and implementation of all laws. The king also appoints members of the higher courts and controls the judiciary through the royally-appointed Minister of Justice. The regime frequently abuses the Crime Prevention Law of 1954 to detain thousands of people by administrative order with limited judicial review, and the Anti-Terrorism and State Security Court Laws of 2014 to try civilians in separate, military-run State Security Courts. As a result, the courts rarely hold regime officials accountable or hear challenges to regime policies, and they frequently rubber-stamp politically-motivated charges against political opponents, journalists, activists, and critics.
Elections are a façade to the point where the mainstream political opposition does not have a realistic chance to meaningfully compete and possibly win. While Jordan’s mainstream opposition party, the IAF, was able to win the largest bloc in the 2024 election, the regime takes serious measures to skew the electoral playing field and deprive elected MPs of any independent authority to legislate. Among these measures, the regime abuses its control over the nominally independent Electoral Commission to target opposition parties and candidates and to otherwise manipulate electoral results in its favor.
The regime takes measures to target and disrupt the opposition despite the electoral and governing systems in Jordan already being rigged significantly in its favor. Jordanians elect members of the lower house of parliament at least every four years, and the IAF – Jordan’s most prominent opposition party – has won large blocs in recent elections, including winning the largest bloc of 31 seats in the 2024 election. However, the king appoints the executive government and the 65 members of the more powerful upper chamber of the legislature, the Senate, who debate, amend, and approve legislation originating in the lower house. As a result, the 138 elected members of the lower House of Representatives do not hold any authority to legislate without the approval of royal appointees. The regime further maintains unfair influence in the popularly elected chamber by gerrymandering electoral districts to grant more parliamentary seats to less populated, more rural districts that traditionally vote for loyalist candidates that support the monarchy, which disenfranchises large populations in urban districts such as Amman or Zarqa with high proportions of marginalized Jordanian citizens of Palestinian descent, who make up the majority of Jordan’s population and historically form the mainstream opposition to the regime.
The regime has engaged in systematic, significant electoral law manipulation and electoral fraud. It takes regular and systematic measures to maintain an unfair balance of power by modifying the constitution or electoral laws in the lead up to every election since at least 2007. Prior, elections were marred by widespread vote buying, fraud, and explicit regime interference. While reforms have made elections in Jordan appear fairer to international observers, the regime has become more strategic in its repression of electoral competition. In addition to gerrymandering districts, the regime changed the voting system from the single, non-transferable vote (SNTV) to an open list proportional representation system ahead of the 2016 elections and again reformed the voting system ahead of the 2024 elections to a hybrid, closed party and open list representation system with the Political Parties Law of 2022, which also codifies further electoral system changes for the planned 2028 and 2032 elections. Such frequent changes, often cast as democratizing reforms to increase the power or pluralism of parties in the government, disrupt the political organizing and campaigning strategies of opposition parties, who face different constituents, registration requirements, and campaign regulations during each election cycle.
The regime has systematically and seriously undermined independent electoral oversight. In an apparent liberalizing concession to the demands of protesters in 2011 for electoral oversight independent from the Ministry of the Interior, the regime created the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in 2012. Although the IEC ameliorated issues of vote-buying and voter fraud that racked past elections in the country, the regime has abused its power to appoint all members of the IEC to unfairly target the political opposition for alleged failure to comply with new regulations. For example, shortly after the passing of the Political Parties Law of 2022, which itself promised increased party power in electoral politics, the IEC unilaterally dissolved 19 of Jordan’s 45 political parties without seeking an order from the Court of First Instance as required by Article 35 of the law. Among the parties that faced forced closure was the Partnership and Salvation Party (PSP), a moderate opposition party founded in 2017 after the regime coerced its founders into becoming a separate legal entity from the IAF. At least 50 members of the PSP reported resigning after receiving threats from security and intelligence agencies, while a lawyer representing the party claims that hundreds of party members resigned after receiving similar threats. The IEC dissolved the party in 2023 for allegedly not meeting the threshold requirement of members under the new parties law, a decision that the Administrative Court of First Instance and the Supreme Administrative Court upheld ahead of the 2024 elections.
Independent media, political leaders, civil society leaders, organizations, and the general public face overt and systematic retaliation if they openly criticize or challenge the regime. While Jordanian citizens engage in a robust civil society and participate in regular protests, the regime takes a wide range of repressive measures to silence and preclude popular dissent. Journalists often face legal harassment from the regime amid a strictly censored media environment. Similarly, the regime has targeted dissenting organizations and protesters with legal challenges and intimidation, and has often resorted to repressive tactics such as unlawful detentions, armed raids, and police violence to shut down mobilized dissent.
The regime systematically and seriously intimidates and obstructs the work of dissenting actors through legal harassment and coercive force. The regime has abused its control over the legislature and executive government to pass a web of vague laws that criminalize dissenting speech, with punitive measures that may intimidate citizens into self-censorship. Anti-defamation and other vague statutes in the Press and Publications Law, the Penal Code, and the Cybercrimes Law criminalize critique of the regime, government institutions, and public discussion of politically sensitive topics. Furthermore, the regime’s coercive apparatus, consisting primarily of the GID and police forces, regularly surveil, intimidate, and detain citizens without judicial review, and harass the family members and social networks of prominent dissidents, which creates an environment of fear to speak about the regime and encourages widespread self-censorship in the public sphere. In a prominent case from May 2025, the regime abused the Cybercrimes Law to forcibly disappear and detain prominent activist and country leader of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, Hamza Khade, for a series of social media posts that featured images of peaceful solidarity demonstrations and criticism of the regime’s complicity in the destruction of Gaza. A few months later, in July 2025, amid rising dissent against widespread coercive actions of GID agents that led to the death of protester Ahmed al-Ibrahim while under police custody in Al-Ramtha, security forces arrested prominent social media activist Ayman Aballi for publishing a video in which he criticized the regime’s silence on the widespread starvation of civilians in Gaza and its harsh crackdown on the peaceful expression of widely held disagreements with its policies.
The regime heavily manipulates media coverage in its favor. State-affiliated media dominate the market, and the regime oversees editorial appointments and licensing for journalists under the Press and Publications Law of 1998. The regime abuses gag orders, anti-defamation laws, and other vague statutes in the Cybercrimes Law and Penal Code to intimidate, detain, and incarcerate journalists who criticize regime policies or publish stories on contentious topics. In 2024, the regime arrested and detained investigative journalist Hiba Abu Taha on politically-motivated charges in two separate cases for “inciting discord and strife among members of society” and “targeting community peace and inciting violence” over two articles she published on politically-sensitive foreign policy issues in newspapers outside of Jordan. Courts sentenced Abu Taha to two years in prison and a fine of 5,000 JOD (approximately $7,000) and denied her bail or appeal. The regime also abuses these vague legal statutes to restrict digital space and limit access to information in the country. In 2023, the regime blocked access to AlHudood, a popular satirical news website, for mocking the crown prince’s lavish wedding and banned TikTok for widespread “misuse” of social media during the 2022 truckers’ movement against decreased fuel subsidies in Ma’an, which was not covered by Jordanian media.
The regime takes systematic measures to shut down major independent organizations that protest regime policy. In 2020, the regime arrested the head of the Teachers Union, Nasser Nawasreh, on incitement for a speech criticizing the executive government and disbanded the Union amid mass protests in Amman demanding higher pay. The regime further abused emergency laws initially passed to limit the spread of COVID-19 to detain 1,000 teachers who peacefully protested and arrested three journalists for breaking a nationwide gag order on the movement. Since 2015, the regime has also taken systematic steps to silence the largest dissenting movement in Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has existed as one of the most prominent civil society movements in Jordan since 1946. In 2020, ahead of parliamentary elections, a court ordered the Muslim Brotherhood Association, a civil branch of the wider organization, to close for allegedly operating without a license under the requirements of the Law of Parties and Associations of 2014. In 2024, security officials raided and shut down the offices of Al-Yarmouk TV, a private broadcaster that operated in Jordan for 12 years and was affiliated with the IAF, a political wing associated with the wider organization, after intimidating and attempting to shut down the outlet multiple times. In 2025, just seven months after the IAF, Jordan’s most prominent opposition party, won a plurality of seats in the 2024 parliamentary elections, the monarchy declared the entire Muslim Brotherhood an illegal organization, raided its offices, and banned the promotion of its ideas.
The regime systematically represses dissenting protests that cross tacit red lines, such as those that critique the monarchy, insult key allies, occupy spaces for extended periods of time, originate from certain disenfranchised groups in society, or spread beyond the local governorate. When truck drivers in the Ma’an governorate went on strike and demonstrated against an increase in fuel prices and the cost of living crisis in 2022, they used TikTok to report news related to the protest across different regions in Jordan amid a complete lack of local media coverage. Taxi and public bus employees and shops in multiple cities across the country joined the strike, leading the regime to shut down the internet in Ma’an and Karak governorates and block access to TikTok throughout the entire country. After passing amendments to expand the Cybercrimes Law in 2023, the regime began to crack down more heavily on dissenting protests and journalists who cover them. For example, for two years following October 2023, Jordanians held weekly protests across the country in solidarity with Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza. During the first six months of the war, security officials arrested more than 1,500 people, and the GID detained thousands more protesters, coerced confessions, issued travel bans, and harassed the family members of participants in these peaceful demonstrations. Mass arrests and intimidation tactics have continued through the end of 2025, resulting in the extrajudicial administrative detention of more than 57,000 Jordanians within a two-year period.
Institutions largely fail to serve as independent checks on the regime. In addition to direct control over state resources and the coercive military, intelligence, and police forces, the Hashemite monarchy maintains its control over all three branches of government by appointing the cabinet and prime minister, the upper house of parliament, and high-ranking judicial officials. Although institutions have at times challenged the regime, citizens face systematic abuse of civilian and extrajudicial court systems that rubber-stamp politically motivated charges and thus retain little recourse for holding the regime and its officials accountable.
The regime has systematically undermined institutional independence to the point that institutions fail to challenge the regime or hold officials accountable. Abdullah II rules as an absolute monarch, personally appointing the executive government, the upper house of the legislature, and members of the higher courts, and maintains direct control over the judiciary through the royally-appointed Minister of Justice. As a result, all legislation must be approved by regime-appointed Senators before being approved or vetoed by the king, and cases or issues challenging the regime are no longer brought or are frequently dismissed by the courts. In the few instances in which lower courts rule in favor of challenges to regime policies, higher courts almost always rule in favor of the regime’s appeal. For example, after the IEC dissolved the Partnership and Salvation Party in 2023, the Administrative Court of First Instance and the Supreme Administrative Court denied the party’s appeals despite the IEC holding no legal authority to dissolve political parties. Similarly, the regime arrested activist Khaled Al-Natour, a popular leader of demonstrations in solidarity with Palestine, under the Cybercrimes Law in February 2024 for a social media post criticizing the regime’s foreign policy. Although he was the first Jordanian citizen to ever be acquitted in a freedom of opinion case shortly after his arrest, the regime appealed his acquittal, and a different court sentenced him to a 5,000 JOD (approximately $7,000) fine.
Courts have systematically, frequently, and unfairly failed to check, or enabled, the regime’s attempts to repress criticism and to make the electoral process significantly skewed in its favor. The courts in Jordan regularly uphold politically-motivated charges against critics and dissenting organizations, such as popular journalist, playwright, and satirist Kamil Al-Zoubi who has been imprisoned ten times since 2014 on vague charges such as “undermining the regime,” “broadcasting false news,” “defaming an official body and inciting sedition,” and “harming the reputation of the State.” The regime has also used its consolidated control over the judiciary to fractionalize the mainstream opposition: ahead of the 2020 elections the Court of Cassation forced the regime’s most formidable political opponent to splinter by court order, targeting the Islamic Action Front by declaring the Muslim Brotherhood illegal, and authorizing the transfer of assets, including confiscated funds and buildings, to a newly formed association led by Brotherhood members closer to the regime. The regime claimed enforcement of the same 2020 court order in its legal reasoning for shutting down and banning the Muslim Brotherhood as an illegal organization in 2025.
Despite its control over the judicial system, the regime directs politically sensitive cases to separate, regime-controlled courts. Through unchecked use of the Crime Prevention Law of 1954, the regime arbitrarily detains thousands of people – one in five inmates in Jordanian prisons – by administrative order without judicial review and tries civilians in separate, military-run State Security Courts (SCC) under vague statutes in the Penal Code, the Counterterrorism Law, Anti-Terrorism Law, and Cybercrimes Law. Anas Al-Jamal, a street vendor in Jordan who is well-known for leading chants at protests, has been convicted and imprisoned by the SCC on multiple occasions under both the 2015 and 2023 Cybercrimes Laws for critical posts on social media. In May 2022, he was convicted of “disturbing relations with a foreign country” for a Facebook post critical of the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Jordan. In 2023, the SCC convicted him again under Article 24 of the Cybercrimes Law for “publishing the names or pictures of law enforcement officials online, or any information or news about them that may offend or harm” in social media posts that criticized regime crackdowns on protests against Israeli occupation of the Jordan River valley. Al-Jamal was released in January 2024 but still faces a court-ordered travel ban as of December 2025.
