How to Arrest a Vessel in UAE Waters

It is worth being explicit about this early, because the terminology causes genuine confusion. Vessel arrest has nothing to do with criminal law, police custody, or a travel ban on an individual — it is a civil procedure, brought by a claimant with a maritime claim, resulting in a court order that physically detains a ship in a UAE port until the claim is resolved or adequate security is posted in its place.

If you are researching this because you or someone you know has been criminally arrested, this guide is not the right resource — that is a different legal process entirely. This guide is about detaining a ship as security for a commercial or maritime claim.

UAE vessel arrest is governed by the UAE Maritime Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 43 of 2023, which sets out the framework for maritime claims and the procedure by which a vessel can be arrested as security for them. This is a federal statute, applying across UAE waters and ports rather than differing port to port.

Because maritime law interacts with international conventions, standard shipping-industry practice, and UAE civil procedure all at once, the specific procedural mechanics of a given arrest application should be confirmed with a lawyer experienced in this specific area, rather than assumed from general commercial litigation experience or from how vessel arrest works in another country.

A maritime claim is broadly the category of claim that entitles a claimant to seek arrest as security — the kinds of disputes that typically arise directly from a vessel’s ownership, operation, or use, such as unpaid charter hire, cargo damage or loss, unpaid crew wages, unpaid bunkers or port disbursements, collision damage, and claims by a mortgagee against a vessel used as security for a loan.

Whether a specific dispute qualifies as a maritime claim for arrest purposes is a legal question worth confirming before applying, since arresting a vessel on a claim that does not properly qualify creates real exposure, covered further below under wrongful arrest.

Vessel arrest applications generally go through the onshore court system in the emirate where the vessel is physically located — Dubai Courts for a vessel in Dubai’s waters and ports, Abu Dhabi Courts for a vessel in Abu Dhabi’s. This is a mainland civil-court function tied to the vessel’s physical location, not something DIFC or ADGM Courts handle independently, since neither operates its own port or maritime jurisdiction of that kind.

Getting the right court and the right emirate’s process from the outset matters, because an arrest application is an urgent, time-sensitive filing — a vessel can leave port relatively quickly once its owners become aware a claim, or an arrest application, is coming.

• Dubai Courts ↗
• Abu Dhabi Judicial Department ↗

A vessel arrest application is typically made on an urgent, often ex parte, basis — meaning the vessel’s owners are generally not notified in advance, precisely because advance notice would give them the opportunity to move the vessel out of the jurisdiction before the arrest order can take effect. Speed and precision in preparing the application matter enormously for this reason.

The applicant generally needs to demonstrate that a qualifying maritime claim exists, that the vessel is the correct one to arrest in relation to that claim, and that the vessel is physically present, or expected imminently, within the court’s jurisdiction. The court may also require the applicant to provide security or an undertaking of its own before granting the order, to protect against the risk of a wrongful arrest.

Many maritime law regimes internationally allow, in defined circumstances, arrest of a different vessel within the same ownership as the one actually connected to the claim, rather than only the specific ship that gave rise to it — a mechanism generally described as sister-ship arrest. Whether and how this applies under the current UAE Maritime Law framework, and what the specific ownership test involves, should be confirmed directly with a lawyer handling the matter rather than assumed from how the concept works elsewhere.

This distinction matters practically because the vessel that actually caused the loss or gave rise to the claim is not always the one still available in UAE waters when the claimant is ready to act.

Arresting a vessel is not a cost-free step for the party seeking it. If an arrest is later found to have been wrongful — brought without a genuine underlying claim, or in bad faith — the party who sought the arrest can face liability to the vessel’s owner for the losses caused by the detention, which for a commercial vessel can be substantial given how quickly demurrage and lost charter income accumulate.

This is part of why a vessel arrest application should be prepared carefully and with genuine confidence in the underlying claim, rather than used as a blunt pressure tactic — the security the court may require from the applicant before granting the order reflects this same risk.

From the shipowner’s side, an arrested vessel is generally released once acceptable security is posted in place of the vessel itself — commonly a bank guarantee, P&I Club letter of undertaking, or another form the claimant and court will accept — covering the value of the underlying claim. Once security is accepted, the vessel is free to sail while the underlying claim proceeds separately.

Negotiating the form and amount of security quickly is usually in both parties’ interest, given how expensive continued detention is for the vessel’s operator, which is why release negotiations often move faster than the underlying claim itself.

In practice, vessel arrest is very often used strategically rather than purely as a final enforcement tool — a claimant with a genuine maritime claim uses the arrest to bring an otherwise unresponsive or foreign-based shipowner to the table, because a detained vessel accumulating costs by the day is a powerful incentive to negotiate that a paper claim alone is not.

This dynamic is particularly visible in charter party disputes, cargo claims against carriers, and unpaid bunker or supply claims, where the underlying commercial relationship may otherwise be difficult to enforce against a foreign-registered or foreign-based owner without a UAE presence to pursue directly.

Many maritime and shipping contracts — charter parties in particular — contain arbitration clauses, often referring disputes to a specific maritime arbitration body or set of rules. Vessel arrest can generally still be sought from the UAE courts as an interim security measure even where the underlying claim itself is destined for arbitration rather than UAE court litigation, because interim relief of this kind is treated separately from the substantive dispute’s forum.

Coordinating an urgent UAE arrest application with an arbitration already underway, or about to be commenced, elsewhere requires careful sequencing, and is exactly the kind of situation where maritime and arbitration expertise need to work together rather than being treated as separate specialisms.

Beyond the “arrest means a person” confusion covered at the start, two other misconceptions recur: that vessel arrest is the same everywhere, when in fact the qualifying claims, procedure, and available defences differ meaningfully between maritime law systems, so experience elsewhere does not automatically translate to UAE practice; and that a vessel arrest is itself the end of the dispute, when it is almost always a step within a larger claim that still needs to be resolved on its merits, whether in the UAE courts or in arbitration.

It is also worth distinguishing vessel arrest from a vessel being detained by port state control, customs, or another regulatory authority for a compliance or safety reason — those are separate processes with different triggers and different routes to resolution, not the civil maritime-claim procedure this guide describes.

LEXNOVA is a lawyer-matching service, not a law firm, and does not file arrest applications or advise on maritime claims itself. What it does is help you describe your situation — the claim, the vessel, and how urgent the matter is — so you can be matched with lawyers experienced in UAE maritime and shipping disputes specifically. Every match is reviewed by a person before it reaches you, and the working relationship from there is directly between you and the lawyer.