As Dubai and Abu Dhabi consolidate their position as arbitration hubs, tribunals are hearing more high-value, high-conflict disputes. The practical question for a party facing a compromised arbitrator is not whether a challenge is possible, but how fast and through which door it must be brought.
The scenario clients bring in
A party discovers, mid-reference, that its opponent's nominated arbitrator has an undisclosed relationship with opposing counsel's firm, or sits on the board of an affiliate of the other side. The instinctive question is: can we get this arbitrator off the case, and does raising it risk being told we've waived the right? Timing and forum choice decide the outcome far more often than the merits of the conflict itself.
The statutory baseline
UAE Federal Law No. 6 of 2018 on Arbitration (the Federal Arbitration Law), which governs onshore-seated arbitrations across all seven emirates, requires an arbitrator to disclose in writing, at the time of appointment and throughout the proceedings, any circumstance likely to give rise to justifiable doubts about their independence or impartiality. A failure to disclose does not automatically unseat the arbitrator: the test is whether the undisclosed circumstance, objectively assessed, would raise justifiable doubts in the mind of a reasonable third party, not whether the challenging party is subjectively unhappy with rulings made so far.
Where the arbitration agreement or institutional rules are silent on procedure, the Federal Arbitration Law provides a default mechanism: the challenge is first put to the tribunal itself (or to the other members if a three-member panel), and if that fails, the challenging party can apply to the competent onshore court. Crucially, this route sits within a short statutory window from the date the challenging party became aware of the grounds. Missing that window is treated as an implicit waiver, and a party cannot resurrect the objection later as a ground to resist enforcement of the eventual award.
Institutional layers change the route, not the deadline logic
Most commercial arbitrations in the UAE now run under institutional rules rather than the Federal Arbitration Law's default mechanism alone, and those rules take priority where they conflict with the default provisions:
- DIAC arbitrations (Dubai): challenges go first to the DIAC Arbitration Court, which decides on the papers, often without detailed reasons. Only after that internal process is exhausted does an onshore court application become relevant, typically confined to narrow grounds.
- ADGM-seated and ADGM-administered references: challenges are generally routed through the tribunal or appointing institution, with the ADGM Courts available as a supervisory backstop given the seat's common law arbitration framework and its adoption of a UNCITRAL Model Law-based regime.
- DIFC-LCIA legacy and successor arrangements: challenges follow the LCIA Rules' internal procedure, with the DIFC Courts available for supervisory intervention only in limited circumstances.
The practical consequence: a party must check the applicable rules before drafting a challenge letter, because addressing it to the wrong body can itself consume the limited time available.
Missing the challenge window is treated as waiver: a conflict you knew about but didn't raise cannot resurface as a ground to resist enforcement of the award.
What the challenge must show
UAE tribunals and courts increasingly look to the IBA Guidelines on Conflicts of Interest in International Arbitration as persuasive, non-binding guidance on where a relationship crosses from disclosable to disqualifying. A bare commercial connection between an arbitrator's firm and a party's affiliate, without more, rarely succeeds. What tends to work is a documented, undisclosed relationship: prior representation of a party or its group, a direct financial interest in the outcome, or repeat appointments by the same law firm at a frequency the arbitrator failed to disclose.
Practical steps for general counsel
- Run a conflicts search on all candidate and appointed arbitrators at the outset, not after a suspicious ruling. Waiting for a bad decision before investigating independence weakens the challenge and invites a waiver argument.
- Put any challenge in writing to the correct forum (tribunal, institution, or court) within days, not weeks, of discovering the ground, and keep a clear record of the discovery date.
- Do not continue actively participating in the merits without an express reservation of rights once a challenge is filed; unqualified continued participation can itself be read as waiver.
- If the challenge fails, preserve the objection expressly for a possible later application to set aside or resist enforcement, since a properly reserved objection (unlike a waived one) can still be raised at that stage.
Key instruments: Federal Law No. 6 of 2018 on Arbitration; DIAC Arbitration Rules 2022; ADGM Arbitration Regulations; LCIA Arbitration Rules as applied in DIFC-seated references; IBA Guidelines on Conflicts of Interest in International Arbitration. General information, not legal advice.