Our Dubai Partner Karim Nassif and his associate Farah El-Hajj Purice wrote an article published in “International Journal of Arab Arbitration”
Article in english
“Introduction
- A foreign judgment is often very difficult to enforce before the Dubai Courts, given that (i) it might not comply with the requirements of Article 235 of the Code of Civil Procedure; and (ii) the Dubai Courts would prove hostile to its admittance in the absence of a treaty on the reciprocal recognition and enforcement of judgments.
- A foreign award is more likely to succeed. The UAE ratified the New York Convention without reservations on the 21st of August 2006. Although Dubai Courts are keen to appear –to a certain extent – “enforcement friendly” regarding foreign awards, so as to uphold the New York Convention, the enforcement process in fact exceeds 12 months in length.
- This lengthy process and the quasi-impossibility of enforcing a foreign judgment in the UAE in the absence of a treaty, forced the practitioners to look for alternatives; out of which, one can cite the DIFC Courts’ role as a conduit jurisdiction.
- As such, we shall try in this Article to shed some light on the context of the problem and its potential solutions. However, at the outset, a brief background of the UAE legal system would make the problem easier to understand and thus to address.”
International Journal of Arab Arbitration, Volume 9, N°1 – 2017
Read the article