How to Challenge or Set Aside an Arbitral Award

These terms get used loosely, but they describe genuinely different legal actions. Setting aside is an action brought at the seat of the arbitration, asking the court supervising that seat to annul the award itself. Resisting enforcement is a defensive action brought where a party is trying to enforce the award against you — you’re not asking to annul the award, only to prevent it being enforced in that specific place. And a DIFC or ADGM-seated award is challenged under that jurisdiction’s own arbitration law, not the federal one.

Which of these applies to your situation depends on where the award was seated and what stage you’re at — whether you’re proactively trying to overturn the award, or reactively defending against an attempt to enforce it against you.

Onshore UAE arbitration is governed by the UAE Federal Arbitration Law — Federal Law No. 6 of 2018, amended by Federal Decree-Law No. 15 of 2023, issued 4 September 2023 — which sets out both the framework for arbitration itself and the grounds and process for setting aside an award seated onshore. The 2023 amendment is the only one the legislation portal records, and it covers arbitrator qualifications and conflicts, remote and technology-enabled hearings, the seat and place of hearings, and the conditions under which members of an arbitral institution’s supervisory body may sit as arbitrators.

DIFC and ADGM each have their own arbitration laws, applying to awards seated within their respective jurisdictions. An award seated in DIFC is governed by DIFC arbitration law, not the federal law, and the same is true for ADGM — this is a jurisdictional distinction that matters as much for arbitration as it does for court litigation and employment law across the same four UAE systems.

The seat of the arbitration — not necessarily where the hearings physically took place, but the legal seat specified in the arbitration agreement or determined by the tribunal — is what decides which law and which court has supervisory jurisdiction over a challenge to the award. This is the first thing to establish, since getting it wrong means pursuing a challenge in a forum that has no authority over the award at all.

Setting aside is not a review of whether the tribunal got the merits right — it’s a narrow, procedurally focused challenge. Recognised grounds generally include matters such as invalidity of the arbitration agreement, a party not being given proper notice or a fair opportunity to present its case, the award dealing with matters outside the scope of what was submitted to arbitration, improper composition of the tribunal, and the award conflicting with UAE public policy.

Because "the tribunal was wrong on the facts" or "the tribunal was wrong on the law" is generally not, by itself, a recognised ground for setting aside, a party considering a challenge needs to look specifically for a procedural or jurisdictional defect rather than a substantive disagreement with the outcome.

A setting-aside action is filed with the court that has supervisory jurisdiction over the seat — the relevant onshore court for a UAE Federal Arbitration Law-governed award. This action is subject to a filing deadline: under Article 54 of the Federal Arbitration Law, an annulment action cannot be heard after 30 days following notification of the award, so time runs from notification, and a lawyer computes the exact date.

Missing this deadline generally closes off the setting-aside route regardless of how strong the underlying grounds might otherwise be, so confirming the current deadline that applies to your specific award — with the court or a lawyer — is one of the most time-sensitive steps in this entire process.

A challenge to a DIFC-seated award runs through the DIFC Courts under DIFC arbitration law, and a challenge to an ADGM-seated award runs through the ADGM Courts under ADGM arbitration law — separate processes from the onshore setting-aside action, with their own grounds, procedure, and deadlines, even though the underlying categories of ground (procedural fairness, jurisdiction, public policy) tend to be conceptually similar across all three regimes.

Where an award was seated outside the UAE and a party is seeking to enforce it here, or where a UAE-seated award is being enforced abroad, the New York Convention — which the UAE is a party to — generally governs. Resisting enforcement under the Convention involves a defined, narrow set of grounds a party can raise at the enforcement stage, distinct from the grounds available for setting aside the award at its seat.

This is a meaningfully different fight from setting aside: you’re not asking any court to annul the award itself, only to refuse to enforce it in the specific place enforcement is being sought, and a refusal in one country doesn’t annul the award or prevent enforcement being sought elsewhere.

• UAE Ministry of Justice ↗

A significant number of contracts drafted before 2021 still reference the DIFC-LCIA as the administering institution and seat for arbitration. A 2021 Dubai decree abolished the DIFC-LCIA (and EMAC) and moved their caseload, which leaves anyone holding an older contract with a DIFC-LCIA clause needing to work out what actually happens if a dispute under that clause arises now.

This is a genuinely practical problem with comparatively little clear public guidance available, and it deserves a direct answer rather than being glossed over: if your contract specifies the DIFC-LCIA, don’t assume the clause is simply unworkable or that arbitration is no longer available to you under it. What actually happens — whether the clause is read as pointing to the institution that inherited the DIFC-LCIA’s caseload, whether it needs interpretation by a court or tribunal, or whether a fresh arbitration agreement is the cleaner path — depends on the specific wording of your clause and is worth resolving with a lawyer before a dispute actually arises under it, not after, since sorting this out in the middle of an active dispute is considerably harder than doing it in advance.

The Dubai International Arbitration Centre (DIAC) is the main onshore arbitral institution following the 2021 changes, and a substantial amount of the caseload affected by the DIFC-LCIA and EMAC abolition has moved in its direction. Anyone drafting a new arbitration clause, or trying to understand where an old clause might practically land, should treat DIAC as the relevant reference point for onshore institutional arbitration today.

• Dubai International Arbitration Centre ↗

Filing a setting-aside action or resisting enforcement doesn’t automatically stop the award from being enforced in the meantime — whether enforcement is stayed while a challenge is pending depends on the specific court and circumstances, and isn’t something to assume without confirming it directly. A party facing enforcement while pursuing a challenge should raise the question of a stay explicitly, rather than assuming one exists by default.

A setting-aside or enforcement-resistance case is generally built on the arbitration’s own procedural record — the arbitration agreement, the tribunal’s procedural orders, correspondence about notice and process, and the award itself, including its reasoning. Because these are narrow, procedurally focused challenges, the quality and completeness of this record matters more than any attempt to re-argue the underlying commercial dispute.

Arguing the tribunal reached the wrong result on the facts or the law, without a genuine procedural or jurisdictional defect behind it.

Disagreement with how the tribunal weighed evidence or assessed witness credibility, which courts generally won’t revisit on a setting-aside application.

A generalised claim of unfairness without pointing to a specific, recognised procedural ground such as lack of notice or improper tribunal composition.

Missing the filing deadline for a setting-aside action, which closes off the route regardless of how the other grounds might otherwise have fared.

LEXNOVA is a lawyer-matching service, not a law firm — it doesn’t file your setting-aside action or assess whether your specific grounds are likely to succeed. What it does is help you describe your situation clearly enough — where the award was seated, what stage you’re at, and what your old clause actually says — to be matched with a lawyer experienced in arbitration challenges. Every match is reviewed by a person, and the professional relationship from there is directly between you and the lawyer.