Dubai Courts Series – Part 1: More Than a Matter of Language: How the Dubai Courts Decide a Case

Introduction and Executive Summary

Commercial parties and their lawyers who are used to the DIFC Courts, or to the courts in London or Singapore, often find the onshore Dubai Courts hard to read. The usual explanations are that proceedings are conducted in Arabic and that the courts apply UAE federal law instead of a system modelled on English law. Both are true, but in our experience much of what surprises newcomers stems from the Dubai Courts belonging to the civil law tradition, and from practices that are particular to the UAE and the wider Gulf.

In this series we attempt to demystify how the Dubai Courts actually work, and to show that once the logic behind them is understood they are a good deal more predictable than newcomers and outsiders tend to believe. Our hope is to make them more accessible to those looking in from outside, and in particular to those who trained in a common law system. This opening article makes a start with the differences that tend to cause the most confusion.

Cases in the Dubai Courts are run and won largely on documents, and witness evidence counts mainly where the documents support it. A party may even be able to settle a disputed fact by putting its opponent on oath. The facts are usually established by a court-appointed expert, with the judge applying the law to the facts as the expert has found them. Judges are not bound by earlier decisions in the way a common law judge is, and often reason directly from the statute. And a judgment may rest on whichever of a party’s arguments the judge finds sufficient, without addressing the others. Taken together, and whatever their drawbacks, these features allow the Dubai Courts to deliver judgment quickly, particularly in straightforward cases.

Two Court Systems in One Emirate

Dubai has two sets of courts hearing civil and commercial disputes. The Dubai Courts are the Emirate’s own onshore courts, with Courts of First Instance, a Court of Appeal and a Court of Cassation.¹ Like the courts of Ras Al Khaimah, they form a local judiciary separate from the federal courts that serve the remaining emirates. They work in Arabic² and apply UAE federal legislation alongside Dubai’s own laws.

The DIFC (Dubai International Financial Centre) Courts, which sit within the DIFC, operate in English and apply a body of DIFC law modelled closely on English law, with a bench drawn largely from common law jurisdictions. The Abu Dhabi Global Market Courts follow a similar model in Abu Dhabi.

UAE civil procedure follows the Egyptian model, itself descended from the French, while UAE civil law, restated in a new Civil Transactions Law that came into force in June 2026, continues to direct the courts to Islamic Shari’ah where the legislation is silent, and to the principles of Islamic jurisprudence in interpreting it.³ Some of what follows will therefore be familiar from civil law systems generally and some of it is particular to the UAE and the Gulf, with the result that the two systems start from rather different ideas of what a court is for and how it should go about deciding a dispute.

Documents and Witness Evidence

A case in the Dubai Courts is conducted largely through written memoranda exchanged between the parties, and hearings tend to be short. The Evidence Law does give the court power to hear witnesses, and once it does, the parties’ lawyers may question them directly.⁴ In civil and commercial cases, however, witnesses are rarely heard at all, and in our experience cross-examination of the kind a common law lawyer would recognise simply does not take place. Where a witness or party is heard, the questions tend to come from the judge, and they are brief and to the point.

In civil matters, a transaction worth more than AED 50,000 must ordinarily be proved in writing unless the parties have agreed otherwise, and witness evidence cannot be used to contradict or go beyond a written document, whatever the amount involved.⁵ The AED 50,000 threshold does not apply to commercial obligations, which may be proved by any means whatever their amount,⁶ although even in a commercial case the court’s instinct is to look first to the paper. The Evidence Law also settles in advance some questions a common law court would leave to weight: a parent, child or spouse cannot give evidence in a party’s favour, nor can a witness with an interest in the outcome, and hearsay is excluded except for a short list of matters such as death, marriage and descent.⁷

Nor can a party easily fill the gaps in its own documents with the counterparty’s documents. There is no general disclosure, and the court will order production of a specific document only in limited circumstances, for instance where it is common to both parties or the opponent has itself relied on it. A party that ignores such an order does so at some risk, since the court may then treat the other side’s copy, or even its account of what the document says, as accurate.⁸

In a common law court, oral testimony is tested through cross-examination, which gives the court an established procedure for exposing gaps, inconsistencies and implausible accounts. Establishing the facts is also a central part of the common law judge’s role: the judge sees and hears the witnesses, decides whom to believe and makes findings of fact, which is why appellate courts are slow to disturb them. In the Dubai Courts, where witnesses are seldom heard and almost never cross-examined, the court will naturally place more trust in contemporaneous documents, which were written before anyone knew there would be a dispute.

Challenging a Document

A party that simply denies its signature on a private document puts the burden of proving the signature on the party relying on it, usually through a handwriting comparison. But a party that has already engaged with the contents of a document before the court can no longer deny it.⁹ Neither route is free of risk. A party whose denial fails may be fined between AED 3,000 and AED 10,000, and a party that alleges forgery and fails will ordinarily be fined the same amount, while a document found to be forged is referred by the court to the Public Prosecution.¹⁰ The order in which a party responds to a document it does not accept can therefore matter a great deal.

The Decisive Oath

One feature with no common law equivalent is the decisive oath. A party that cannot otherwise prove its claim may ask the court to put its opponent on oath about a fact within the opponent’s own knowledge, such as whether a sum was borrowed or repaid. If the opponent swears, the point is decided in the oath-taker’s favour and the other side is not permitted to prove that the oath was false. Its recourse lies in a criminal conviction for the false oath, after which it may claim compensation and challenge the judgment. If the opponent refuses to swear and does not turn the oath back on the claimant, the point goes against the opponent.¹¹ The judge may also administer a supplementary oath to either party where the evidence points one way but falls short of proof.¹²

The Evidence Law states the underlying rule in terms familiar from Islamic law: the burden of proof lies on the claimant, and the one who denies must do so on oath.¹³ A common law lawyer may find it strange that a case can turn on a party’s willingness to swear, but a claimant with thin documents should think carefully before using it, since the outcome then rests on its opponent’s conscience.

Who Finds the Facts?

The Evidence Law allows the court to appoint an expert, on its own initiative or at a party’s request, to give an opinion on technical matters needed to decide the case.¹⁴ The power is not confined to the trial judge. Cases are prepared by a Case Management Office under a supervising judge before they reach the court that decides them, and the supervising judge may appoint an expert at that stage.¹⁵ In practice the power is used so readily that it is unusual for a case of any substance to reach judgment without an expert’s report, and accounting experts in particular are appointed even where the dispute is not obviously technical.

The expert meets the parties, receives their documents and comments, may visit premises or speak to those involved, and must circulate a draft report for the parties’ comments before filing a final one. Objections need to be made at the draft stage, since new objections to the final report are admitted only where they rest on matters that arose after it was filed. The court can call the expert to a hearing, send the report back or appoint another expert.¹⁶

The court is not bound by the report and must give reasons if it departs from it,¹⁷ but in practice it frequently adopts the expert’s findings. In many cases, then, the expert identifies the facts and the judge applies the law to the facts so established, a division of labour with no real counterpart in common law litigation. Experts are not meant to decide questions of law, although the line between fact and law is not always easy to hold in a report on, say, whether a contractor was entitled to an extension of time.

It is in the meetings with the expert that the documents are examined, the accounts reconciled and the other side’s version of events tested, which makes the expert stage one of the most consequential steps in the proceedings.

Precedent in the Dubai Courts

There is no doctrine of binding precedent in the Dubai Courts obliging a first instance or appeal judge to follow the decisions of the courts above, and judges rely on earlier decisions far less than common law lawyers tend to expect. The primary source of law is the statute, and the judge’s task is understood as applying its text to the facts of the case at hand. Judgments at first instance and on appeal are not published in a form that would allow them to be cited systematically, and are largely available only in Arabic.

Principles laid down by the Court of Cassation are treated differently. The court’s Technical Office extracts, indexes and publishes them, and a case in which a division of the court departs from a principle established in an earlier cassation judgment falls to be decided by an expanded General Panel.¹⁸ The Court of Cassation may also summarily dismiss a challenge that raises a point it has already settled as a principle.¹⁹ Lower courts generally follow these principles, and an advocate who can show that a point has been settled at cassation level is in a strong position. Below that level, each judge is free to apply his or her own mind to the statute and the facts and to decide the case afresh, and an argument rooted in the wording of the statute will usually carry further than one resting on what other courts have done in other cases.

Why the Judgment May Not Answer Every Argument

The complaint we hear most often from parties new to the Dubai Courts is that the judge did not engage with their case, by which they usually mean that the judgment dealt with one of their arguments and said nothing about the others.

An English judgment will ordinarily take each of the principal issues in turn and explain whether, and to what extent, the judge accepts or rejects each party’s case on it, and the Court of Appeal has made clear that a judgment which fails to explain how the issues vital to the conclusion were resolved is open to challenge.²⁰ Judges often go further and decide points that are not strictly necessary, partly so that an appellate court has findings to work with if it takes a different view on the main point.

Judges in the Dubai Courts are also required to give reasons,²¹ but a trial court need not follow the parties through each of their arguments and answer each one separately, so long as the facts it has accepted, and its reasons for accepting them, implicitly dispose of the rest. Take a claimant who advances three arguments, each of which it believes is capable of succeeding on its own. The judge is persuaded by the first, grants the relief sought on that basis and says nothing about the second or third, which as far as the court is concerned did not need deciding. To the claimant, who may have thought the second argument its strongest, it can look as though it was never read.

An argument that the first instance court did not reach can still succeed on appeal if it is maintained, since an appeal to the Court of Appeal returns the case, so far as it is appealed, to where it stood before the first instance judgment, with the evidence and arguments raised below carried forward.²² Where the claim exceeds AED 500,000 or is of indeterminate value, the judgment can then be challenged before the Court of Cassation for insufficient reasoning, and a court that has overlooked an essential defence, meaning one capable of changing the outcome if accepted, leaves its judgment open to that challenge.²³ In practical terms it pays to lead with the strongest argument, to make clear which arguments stand independently of one another and to highlight which points could be decisive.

Speed, and What It Costs

This approach is fundamentally different from the way most common law courts function, and it has both advantages and disadvantages. A party with an honest witness but few documents will struggle to make its case. Much turns on the quality of the expert. Judgments can be short, and it is not always apparent why a particular point failed.

Against all this, a court that decides on the documents, does not hold lengthy trials, leaves technical questions to an expert and decides only what it needs to decide can deliver a first instance judgment in a fraction of the time a full common law trial would take, and at proportionately lower cost.

What This Means in Practice

Commercial relationships that might one day come before the Dubai Courts should be documented as they go, since an agreement reached orally or a variation agreed over the telephone will be difficult to prove later, and key correspondence should be kept and, once proceedings are in prospect, translated into Arabic by a legal translator. The expert stage, and the draft report in particular, deserves the care a common law lawyer would give to preparing for trial. Submissions should put the best point first, flag any argument the court must deal with and stay anchored in the text of the law.

The two systems rest on different assumptions about how facts are best established and what a judgment needs to do, and much of the frustration felt in the Dubai Courts by parties new to Dubai, and by common law lawyers generally, comes from expecting one system to behave like the other. Later articles in this series will look more closely at how a claim moves through the Dubai Courts, from filing to enforcement.

This publication does not provide any legal advice and is for information purposes only.

1. Dubai Law No. 13 of 2016 Concerning the Judicial Authorities in the Emirate of Dubai, art 17. ↩︎
2. Federal Decree-Law No. 42 of 2022 Promulgating the Civil Procedure Code (“Civil Procedure Code”), art 5(1). ↩︎
3. Civil Transactions Law, arts 1(2) and 2, promulgated by Federal Decree-Law No. 25 of 2025, which repealed Federal Law No. 5 of 1985 with effect from 1 June 2026 (arts 2 and 3 of the Decree-Law). ↩︎
4. Federal Decree-Law No. 35 of 2022 Promulgating the Law of Evidence in Civil and Commercial Transactions (“Evidence Law”), arts 72 and 78. ↩︎
5. Evidence Law, arts 66 to 68. ↩︎
6. Federal Decree-Law No. 50 of 2022 Promulgating the Commercial Transactions Law, art 91. ↩︎
7. Evidence Law, arts 69 and 71. ↩︎
8. Evidence Law, arts 33 to 35. ↩︎
9. Evidence Law, arts 28, 39 and 40. ↩︎
10. Evidence Law, arts 43 and 49. ↩︎
11. Evidence Law, arts 93, 94, 98 and 99. ↩︎
12. Evidence Law, art 105. ↩︎
13. Evidence Law, art 2(1). ↩︎
14. Evidence Law, art 109(1). ↩︎
15. Civil Procedure Code, art 45. ↩︎
16. Evidence Law, arts 115, 119 and 121. ↩︎
17. Evidence Law, art 122(2). ↩︎
18. Dubai Law No. 13 of 2016, arts 20 and 22. ↩︎
19. Civil Procedure Code, art 185(1). ↩︎
20. English v Emery Reimbold & Strick Ltd [2002] EWCA Civ 605, [2002] 1 WLR 2409, para 19. ↩︎
21. Civil Procedure Code, arts 129 and 130. ↩︎
22. Civil Procedure Code, art 167(1) and (4). ↩︎
23. Civil Procedure Code, art 175(1)(e). ↩︎