Oman is an absolute monarchy in which all legislative, executive, and judiciary power ultimately rests in the hands of the hereditary sultan, and in which the system of laws is based firmly on Islamic sharia. Although a report by the U.S. State Department, based on conditions in 2010, summed up the human rights situation in the country by asserting that the government “generally respected the human rights of its citizens,” the details in the report itself strongly indicate otherwise, and several international human-rights groups have described the state of human rights in Oman in highly critical terms. According to a report, on 20 December 2015, poet and television producer Nasser al-Badri was summoned by the Police Special Section and detained for 12 days without charge and without trial. The report added that the Omani Observatory for Human Rights said that al-Badri was detained because of tweets he posted criticising Sultan Qaboos and the state of the country’s economy. Article 41 of Oman’s statute (constitution) criminalizes any criticism of the sultan, stating that the sultan’s ‘person is inviolable and must be respected and his orders must be obeyed’.