Civil Claims and Evidence in the UAE

Most civil claims are decided by the documents, not by the argument. By the time a matter reaches a hearing, what each side can prove has usually been fixed for months, sometimes years, by decisions taken when nobody thought a dispute was coming.

I advise on civil claims in the UAE and on the evidence question that sits underneath every one of them, which is what a person can actually establish from the record they already have.

The law that governs proof

Evidence in civil and commercial matters is governed by Federal Decree-Law No. 35 of 2022, the Law of Evidence in Civil and Commercial Transactions, which replaced the 1992 law. It works alongside Federal Decree-Law No. 46 of 2021 on Electronic Transactions and Trust Services.

The 2022 law contains a dedicated treatment of electronic evidence, which is the most significant practical change for anyone doing business in the UAE, because almost every commercial relationship now runs through messages rather than letters.

Are WhatsApp messages evidence

Yes, subject to conditions, and this is now well established rather than novel. Electronic documents can carry the same effect as written ones where their origin and integrity can be verified, and the law expressly contemplates emails and instant messages.

The Dubai courts have gone further than many people realise. A WhatsApp exchange has been treated as forming a binding agreement where no signed contract existed, with the sender identified through the mobile number linked to him. That matters in both directions. It means a message trail can establish an agreement, and it also means a message sent carelessly can create an obligation.

Two practical points. Deleting messages does not remove them from the case, because the other side has the same conversation. And a party generally cannot escape a message by demanding production of an original, which is a defence that used to be run more successfully than it is now.

Where practice is not yet uniform

The federal position on digital evidence is clear. How it is applied is less uniform, and the Rental Dispute Centre in particular has not always treated electronic material the way the federal law contemplates.

This is worth knowing rather than glossing over. Advice that assumes every forum in the UAE approaches digital evidence identically will sometimes be wrong, and which forum a matter belongs in can change what is worth relying on.

The court-appointed expert

In most commercial and construction matters, and many civil ones, the court appoints an expert to examine the documents and report. People expect the judge to weigh the arguments. In practice the expert's report frequently determines the outcome, and the hearing that follows is largely about that report.

This changes how a case should be prepared. The material has to be organised for someone who was not present, has no interest in either party and will work primarily from what is in front of him. A file that makes sense to the person who lived through the events is not the same as a file that makes sense to an expert reading it cold.

What to gather before starting anything

The signed agreement and any later variations. The payment record. The dated correspondence from the period when the problem first appeared, rather than the period after lawyers became involved. Any written acknowledgement by the other side. Anything created contemporaneously.

The last point is the one that matters most. A message sent on the day something went wrong is worth considerably more than a detailed account of the same events written a year later, and no amount of later effort produces a substitute for it.