UAE Law and Practice Contributed by: Gerard Moore, Patricia Ugalde Revilla, Antonin Sobek and Alanood Sinjab, Mayer Brown
tional relations, public international law, international trade and EU law, supporting her work on disputes with international and regulatory dimensions.
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1. General 1.1 Prevalence of Arbitration
• offshore (ADGM): the ADGM Arbitration Regula - tions 2015 (as amended) (the “ADGM Arbitration Regulations”). The choice of the DIFC or ADGM as the seat of the arbitration is increasingly popular, given they adopt a common law system of jurisprudence – which affords greater predictability in terms of precedent. By con - trast, onshore UAE follows a civil law system. Article 20 of the DIAC 2022 Rules and Article 22 (2) of the ArbitrateAD 2024 Rules respectively designate the DIFC and ADGM as the default seat in the absence of party agreement, though onshore seats remain common (51% of the Dubai International Arbitration Centre (DIAC)’s 2024 caseload was seated in onshore Dubai (DIAC Annual Report 2024, p 51)). Arbitral Institutions There are two leading arbitral institutions in the UAE: • DIAC; and • the Abu Dhabi International Arbitration Centre (branded as ArbitrateAD). Their rules are based on modern international arbitra - tion principles, including party autonomy, separability of the arbitration agreement and limited court inter -
International arbitration is one of the principal meth - ods of resolving disputes in the UAE for both domestic and international parties, and is firmly integrated into the jurisdiction’s dispute resolution architecture. This is reflected in: • the UAE’s comprehensive arbitral legal framework; • the establishment of leading arbitral institutions within it; and • its growing status as an enforcement-friendly juris - diction. Legal Framework The applicable arbitral legal framework in the UAE differs depending on whether the proceedings are seated onshore or offshore (ie, in a freezone such as the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) or the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM)). The key legislation is set out as follows: • onshore: Federal Law No 6 of 2018 (as amended) (the “UAE Arbitration Law”); • offshore (DIFC): DIFC Arbitration Law No 1 of 2008 (as amended) (the “DIFC Arbitration Law”); and
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