Enforcing Foreign Wills in the UAE: Lessons From Real Inheritance Cases

Welcome back to Lawgical with Ludmila, where we untangle the legal knots so that you don't have to. I'm Ludmila Yamalova, a US-qualified lawyer based in Dubai. In each episode, we break down complex law into clear, practical insights that you can actually use.

Today we're talking about enforcing foreign wills in the UAE. Someone has passed away, their will was made abroad, or their heirs live abroad, but the apartment, the bank account or the company is here in the UAE. How do you actually get those assets into the hands of the heirs? Let's unpack it.

Why are we doing this episode? In our practice, we're seeing a growing number of foreign wills that need to be enforced in the UAE. Perhaps that's simply because I've been practising in the UAE for so long, which may be an indication of my age. Be that as it may, we're seeing an increasing number of foreign wills to enforce.

Many foreigners, as we know, own property, bank accounts, companies and all types of other assets in the UAE, but most made their estate plans at home, wherever that may be. In many cases, they have more than one home, and sometimes there are even wills from multiple jurisdictions. Very often, their heirs have never set foot in the UAE. At the end of that person's life, the heirs sometimes don't even know what is being passed on to them. They have certainly never been to the UAE and don't know what to do with a particular will.

I want to be clear about the scope of this episode. We've covered estate planning before, in episodes on why it's important to have a will in the UAE, civil wills in Abu Dhabi, the DIFC probate roadmap and the new UAE personal status law. This episode is more limited. It focuses specifically on enforcement: of foreign wills, of foreign judgments, and of the wishes of foreign heirs.

Why is enforcement so complicated in the UAE? Different aspects of inheritance have been covered many times in previous episodes, but this one focuses only on enforcement. I'm focusing on it because there are so many complexities. We've discussed in the past that having a will registered in the UAE is much better than having no will at all, or having a foreign will. This episode will explain why that is the case: why it is so difficult to enforce a foreign will, or the wishes of foreign heirs, in the UAE.

The issues are many, but let me give you a representative list of the more typical ones. The first is different religions. If the deceased was, or might have been, Muslim, Islamic inheritance rules apply instead of the civil rules. A marriage to a Muslim spouse, or records that do not match between countries, can be enough to raise that question, and we've had plenty of such cases in our practice. That's what I'll do in this episode: set out the legal framework and the issues, and then share specific examples we've encountered, to give you a flavour of how real these issues are.

Another complication is changing family circumstances: multiple marriages, divorces, children from different relationships. Each one changes who the heirs are. Then there are questions about marital status. A death certificate says divorced, but older documents say otherwise. Or a separation under one country's law is not a divorce under another country's law. Again, all of these are examples from cases we've handled.

Another issue is heirs in different countries, for example in the US, Europe or Russia, with no UAE residency or Emirates ID, and therefore no legal footprint here or access to the courts.

Yet another is family conflict and non-cooperation. Again, these are very real cases that we're handling right now. A sibling left out of the will, or an heir who simply refuses to get involved, can stall the whole process.

And another is wills that don't fit the UAE system: for example, a will that cross-references a foreign trust, which is a case we're handling right now; two wills in different countries; or a will that expressly excludes UAE assets.

All of these issues can complicate the enforcement of a foreign will, and all of these examples come from real cases in our own practice. They're not hypothetical, and I'm not raising them to scare anyone or overcomplicate things. These are real challenges, and in many cases, it's the details that may seem very minor that prolong the process the most.

There's another element, something we've also handled in the past, and that's when minors are among the heirs. That adds a whole further layer of complexity: guardianship, court supervision of the minors' share and more. That in itself is a topic for another episode.

Now let's go through the documents required to enforce a will in the UAE. We'll start with what the will is, which is in itself a very important concept, because it can mean so many different things for the purposes of enforcement in the UAE. But before we talk about the content or format of the will itself, let's go through what may seem a very administrative and bureaucratic process: presenting the whole package when you're trying to enforce the will.

You present the will, and it then needs to be supported by a whole series of other documents. Some of these are not just important but necessary, and in many cases, if any one of them is missing, the whole chain breaks down and you can't move forward. Again, these are examples from our own practice.

One example is missing originals. The family does not have the original will at all, and obtaining it from abroad may take months. In many cases, it does take months. When the heirs or the family of the deceased send UAE lawyers a copy of the will, that's just a starting point. You still need to produce the original at some point, because it needs to be legalised, and for that, the original must be presented to the relevant authorities in the relevant country. In many cases, the process of tracking down the original document is a mission and a half.

Another problem is the wrong document. We've had cases where a document was believed to be the will, and in fact it wasn't the will at all. It was an inheritance decision, or the other way around. We needed a will but had an inheritance decision, or we had an inheritance decision but needed a will. Often, you need both.

What complicates this even further, as a general rule, is that the heirs are often elderly people. If they live abroad, dealing with this documentation, gathering the documents and getting them attested and legalised is not as simple as it would be for someone younger and more tech-savvy. Even something as simple as the difference between a will and an inheritance decision took us a while to explain to some of our older clients.

They're also often based outside the UAE, and don't forget the language barrier, because English is often not their native language. Add that to the mix: explaining to an elderly person who has just lost a loved one, in a language that's not native to them, the difference between the document they believe is the will and the documents we actually need is a process in itself. That's important to keep in mind, because it is all too real.

Another challenge is wording that doesn't reach the UAE. For example, we've had a foreign order that did not mention UAE assets, and a will that expressly excluded them. The family has a document that looks like a will, or like a court decision, but to enforce it in the UAE, we need more than that. If a document specifically excludes the UAE, that's one challenge. If it does not mention UAE assets at all, that's a different kind of challenge. That's another reason why enforcing foreign wills is not a simple matter.

Another is court orders that point to other orders. For example, a final foreign order refers to an earlier order without repeating what the earlier order said. Again, that's all too typical.

Another is name discrepancies: different surnames over the years, or inconsistent spellings and transliterations. It has even happened that a name could not be entered correctly in Arabic on the court portal. These may all seem very small things, but as I share real-life examples, you'll see how these nuances, which may seem irrelevant or minute, become the stumbling block to filing the case. For example, you're required to enter names in Arabic on the portal, so if the name is misspelled, there's your issue.

Another is inconsistent facts: records that disagree on marital status, or even on the country where the person died. We've handled those as well. For example, the family claims the deceased was not married, but there's a person in the UAE who claims to be the deceased's spouse, and there is in fact a marriage contract somewhere. That's another type of discrepancy that has happened and complicates the enforcement process.

Perhaps the most common, as we all know by now, is the legalisation chain. Every document must be legalised abroad, attested by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and then translated into Arabic. An apostille alone is not enough. It's a whole chain of legalisations, attestations and translations that must happen before any foreign document can be presented to the local authorities. The process is not streamlined, because it depends on which jurisdiction the document comes from, and every jurisdiction has different agencies responsible for legalisation. As a reminder, this is because the UAE is not a party to the Hague Apostille Convention, which governs the recognition of foreign signatures and stamps. That's why every foreign document presented in the UAE must go through this fairly lengthy legalisation process, or attestation, whatever you want to call it.

Another nuance is the power of attorney. Whoever and wherever the heirs are, they will ultimately need to grant a power of attorney to whoever represents the estate or acts on their behalf in the UAE, be it legal consultants, local advocates or other representatives. The power of attorney is a separate process in itself, because it has to be recognised in the UAE, not just abroad. Having that document attested in other countries, with text that matches what the UAE authorities require, is not a simple task. So, in most cases, for a power of attorney to actually be accepted, it should be done through a UAE notary.

Then there are passports. The court may ask, and often does ask, for the passports of every person named in the will, not only the heir claiming the asset. In most cases, this information gathering and factual document collection is the longest part of the process.

What I've just described is a list of issues. I've spent so much time setting them out because, first, they come from real-life experience. These are actual issues. Second, if I look at the spectrum from A to Z of enforcing a foreign will, they probably take up around 80% of the process in many cases. Collecting all these documents and getting them into a form in which they can be presented to the UAE authorities is 80% of the process. So when I say enforcing a foreign will in the UAE is challenging, it's because of everything required before you're able to file a case and submit the supporting documents. Once you've filed the case and have all the supporting documents, the case actually moves pretty fast.

Now let's do a quick refresher. For details, you can go back to the earlier episodes, but let's look at the different universes: foreign wills versus UAE wills versus no will. Again, this is just a very high-level summary of what I've described in detail in previous episodes.

We have three scenarios. There's the foreign will, which is mostly what we'll talk about today. There's the UAE will, which we'll discuss to the extent it's relevant, as a contrast, to show the difference in process and timing when you have a UAE will rather than a foreign one. And there's the scenario where there's no will.

The easiest to enforce in the UAE is, of course, a UAE will. It can be registered in several jurisdictions: in the DIFC, the Dubai International Financial Centre; in the Dubai courts, in more limited cases; or in the Abu Dhabi courts. Because it's already part of the UAE system, even a will from Abu Dhabi is very easily enforced in, say, Dubai. That's the easiest path.

Between a foreign will and no will, a foreign will is sometimes the next easiest path. Sometimes. That's if the foreign will takes a certain shape and form, which is what I'll talk about today. In other cases, even if you have a will, the form in which it can be presented to the UAE authorities is such that it's the equivalent of having no will. In fact, the process you have to go through is the same as if there were no will. The will then becomes more of a supporting document, not the foundational document on which the courts rely.

Another general challenge is religion. For Muslims, the Islamic inheritance rules apply, under Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2024 on Personal Status, which is quite a new law. For non-Muslims, a different law applies: Federal Decree-Law No. 41 of 2022 on Civil Personal Status. Both sets of laws are quite new.

As I mentioned earlier, it depends on the religion, the passport and the circumstances of the heirs. Generally speaking, non-Muslims are governed by the civil personal status law, with a few exceptions. Muslims may or may not be governed by the UAE personal status law, which is based on the principles of Sharia. They may also select the law of their own country, or sometimes even benefit from the civil personal status law. Again, it depends on the underlying form of the will.

To be honest with you, these are all very exciting topics, as convoluted as they may appear, because at least we're talking about them. We're talking about different options. As the various episodes I've done on this topic highlight, there are so many variables, nuances and scenarios in the context of wills. That's a huge departure from where we were before the laws in the UAE started changing in 2020.

Until then, there was only one approach. Everybody was subject to the UAE personal status law as it existed at that time, not the current one, and it offered very limited options based on the principles of Sharia. In simple terms, first, the principles of Sharia applied to everybody's inheritance, Muslim or non-Muslim. Second, foreign wills were more or less not a topic for discussion, because it was practically impossible to apply or argue a foreign will in the UAE. In short, everybody was subject to the Sharia principles of the UAE personal status law. So, as complicated as what I'm describing here may sound, it's progress. It's progress because it now offers so many options to so many different people, irrespective even of religion. It's good news.

Now let's talk about the two kinds of foreign wills, which is what we'll focus on most in today's episode. For enforcement purposes, foreign wills fall into two general categories.

The first is a will that exists but is not directly enforceable. The will, or even a foreign inheritance decision, declares who the heirs are, but does not order anything to happen. We have an example of this from the Czech Republic. We have an actual inheritance decision, but its language does not instruct any court to do anything further. I'll go into the specifics later, but it doesn't give any instructions to another court, such as the UAE courts, to take the next step, and that in itself makes it insufficient.

That's the example I mentioned earlier: even where you have a foreign will, you may not be able to enforce it here because of the probate process in the original jurisdiction. The will is a document, and to probate it, ratify it or confirm it, depending on the jurisdiction, it goes through different processes. In the Czech Republic, for example, in addition to the will, there was what's called an inheritance decision. But neither the will nor the inheritance decision, as issued, contained instructions sufficient for the UAE courts to act on. So, even though there was a will, the courts here could not enforce it. To use that will in court proceedings here, you have to file a case as if there were no will to begin with, and submit the will simply as evidence.

The second is a foreign will that is enforceable. That's the easier case. It's not quite as easy as enforcing a UAE will, such as an Abu Dhabi or DIFC will, but it's a fairly easy and streamlined process. It's a foreign will that comes wrapped in a court order that the UAE courts can actually execute.

That's the difference. In one case, you have a will with an inheritance decision that doesn't give the UAE courts sufficient instructions to act on. In the other, you have a foreign will wrapped in a court order that gives the UAE courts specific instructions on how to act and execute. In both cases, you have a will, but in the first you can't really use it, while in the second you can use it in a very similar way to a will registered in the UAE.

We had an example of the second kind from Scotland. In Scotland, the executors obtained confirmation from the Sheriff Court, which issued an instrument authorising them to deal with the estate. That language was sufficient for the courts here to accept it and proceed directly towards enforcement. So which category your will falls into ultimately decides your path for enforcing the deceased's wishes in the UAE.

Now let's talk about the roadmap. As I said, there's the will that is readily enforceable and the will that is not, so there are two different paths. Visually, imagine two separate roads. One path is the writ of execution. The other is the estate court.

Let me break it down. With a writ of execution, you ask the execution judge to enforce the foreign court order directly. It happens very fast, but it's only available for the right kind of document. I'll explain what that means, but if you visualise it: you have a foreign will with a foreign court order, and here in the UAE, what you open is the equivalent of an enforcement application straight away. You don't have to argue the substance of the decision or identify and prove who the heirs are in the detail I described earlier. You already have a court decision, so it's almost like enforcing a foreign judgment. You file it as a writ of execution, and the local courts process it very quickly. Within a matter of weeks, you could already have a decision on the basis of which you can start transferring assets.

That's path one. Path two is the estate court. Here, you don't file your case as a writ of execution. You file it specifically in the estate court, a dedicated court that deals with inheritance. You open a case there whether you have a will, a disputed will, no will, or a will that's not enforceable. It's a very different path from the writ of execution: a substantive case. If your foreign will doesn't come wrapped in a court order that allows the local courts to act on it and execute it as it is, you file at the estate court and present the same will. It's still evidence, just not the governing evidence. Depending on how it's drafted, the court may rely on it or may dismiss it altogether.

Now let's look at the steps you need to go through before you can ultimately transfer the assets. This is a good time to pause and remind ourselves why we're talking about this at all: the heirs ultimately want the assets of the deceased transferred into their names. To get there, there are multiple steps in the courts.

If you're filing an estate case, you first need to obtain the court order confirming who the heirs are and what the assets are. Then you obtain the writ of execution. After that, you go to enforcement, through the enforcement courts, and the court issues letters to specific authorities to start transferring the assets. So, if you file a substantive case, there are three steps. And that's provided there are no challenges to the will to begin with, which is a topic for another discussion, although I'll touch on it a little later.

If you have a foreign will wrapped in a court order that the UAE courts can rely on, and you can therefore use the writ of execution path, you still have two stages. First, you file the writ of execution case, which is a faster process than the substantive case. After that, you still need to open an enforcement case, on the basis of which the court will start issuing letters to the various authorities or entities, requesting them to transfer the assets into the names of the heirs. So it's not that you file one case and, at the end of it, the assets are transferred to you. It's a staged process.

On the scope of what we're discussing today: we're talking about foreign wills. However, as I was preparing for this episode, other wills kept coming to mind, such as wills from Abu Dhabi or the DIFC courts. If you're enforcing one of those in Dubai, in a way it's almost like a foreign will. Because it's an Abu Dhabi or DIFC decision that you're trying to enforce in the Dubai courts, it's all done through a writ of execution, which is a much simpler route, but in a way it's similar to enforcing a foreign will in Dubai. That's why examples from Abu Dhabi or DIFC wills sometimes come in handy: they parallel some of the experiences we have when enforcing a foreign will. But for the rest of the episode, we'll talk primarily about foreign wills.

Now let's talk about the writ of execution: what it is, and why some wills can be enforced this way and others cannot. The main legal rule is in the civil procedure law, Federal Decree-Law No. 42 of 2022, the UAE Civil Procedure Law. Specifically, Articles 222 and 225, which sometimes conflict a little. Generally speaking, under this law, a foreign judgment or order can be enforced through what's called an order on petition to the execution judge, who must decide within five working days. That gives you an idea of how quickly you could potentially enforce a foreign will if you had it in the right shape and form for the UAE courts. It's similar to an Abu Dhabi or DIFC will: you go to the same execution judge. An order on petition is a one-way, ex parte application straight to the execution judge, who must decide within five working days. So you can move very quickly.

In deciding, the judge usually looks at the following. Depending on the country, it may look at reciprocity: whether the foreign country would enforce a UAE judgment in a similar situation. It may also look at jurisdiction and proper notice in the foreign proceedings, and whether the judgment is final in the original country. And, as always, the overarching factor all judges look at is whether the will conflicts with UAE public order.

There's some uncertainty, as I said, between Articles 222 and 225, because Article 225 refers to treaties between the two countries, while Article 222 does not actually require a treaty. In the past, that's where a lot of contention arose, and wills often weren't enforced because there was no reciprocal treaty. These days, as long as the foreign will comes to the UAE in the form of a foreign judgment, Article 222 applies in most cases. The courts don't require a treaty and enforce it as if it were a UAE judgment, provided it has gone through all the documentary steps we discussed earlier: legalisation, attestation and translation.

The decisive question is simple: does the foreign document contain an enforceable obligation? Most foreign wills and inheritance decisions only declare who the heirs are, and that hasn't been enough. That's the issue. To give a specific example, what's typical in foreign jurisdictions is that the court issues a decree stating who the heirs to the estate are. That alone is not sufficient for the writ of execution path in the UAE, because the courts here need to see instructions to act on. The instructions would be along the lines of: these are the heirs, and therefore all the assets should be transferred to them. Or: specific assets are to be transferred to specific heirs. Or: the assets in this country are to be transferred to these heirs, and the assets in the UAE are to be transferred to that heir. That's the difference between a foreign will that can and cannot be enforced in the UAE by way of a writ of execution.

To give you a little more colour on the cases where the writ of execution path did work: as I mentioned, there was the Scottish judgment we had a few years ago, in 2021. The Scottish court issued a confirmation of who the heirs were, with specific instructions for the assets to be transferred to those heirs. We filed it by way of an order on petition, which, as I mentioned, is an ex parte application that you don't need to serve on the other side.

Let me take a step back, because there's an interesting nuance here. Whenever you file an inheritance case in the UAE, you still have to file it against someone, and in all cases, you file it against the deceased. That's how it works: the heir files a case against the deceased.

In this case, the heirs, who were in Scotland, hired us, and we worked to enforce the will, which by then had been ratified by the Scottish courts and had gone through all the legalisation and translation steps. The death certificate also had to go through all the same steps. We submitted all the documents: the legalised death certificate, all the passports, the Scottish court order and the list of assets. Once we had submitted everything, we had an enforceable judgment within just a few weeks.

There was another recent case in which the Dubai Court of Cassation enforced an English High Court judgment. I'll use it only as an example, to contextualise what we mean by a court order that the courts here can rely on. It wasn't an inheritance case. The English High Court had ordered a husband to transfer two Dubai properties to his former wife. The husband argued that only the Dubai courts could rule on Dubai property and that enforcement breached public order. The Court of Cassation rejected both arguments and upheld enforcement under Article 222, which I mentioned earlier, applying reciprocity. In other words, the English courts had been found to enforce UAE judgments, so the UAE courts would equally enforce English judgments without reviewing the case on its merits. In that case, a foreign order directing the transfer of Dubai property was enforced directly.

Contrast that with the Czech judgment, or Czech will, we had just last year. Our application to enforce the Czech inheritance decision was first rejected, within four days, so at least quickly. Because we filed it as a writ of execution, and all writ of execution requests must be decided within five days, that's also a benefit: you find out very quickly whether your will takes a form the local courts can rely on and enforce. The court's reason for rejection was the lack of an obligation in the judgment for which the writ of execution was requested. That's the wording of the decision. In other words, the court said it could not enforce this particular judgment because it lacked any instructions for the court to act on.

By the way, because a writ of execution is an order on petition, you can file it multiple times. In the second round, before a different judge, on the same facts and the same application, that judge raised a different objection: he rejected enforcement on the basis that there was no treaty between the UAE and the Czech Republic. So there's an example of the difference between Scotland and the Czech Republic.

We've also had cases involving Switzerland, and that was a very complicated process. Although it was a Swiss will, it was additionally subject to French law, and minors were involved. It was extremely complicated, and ultimately it was almost impossible to enforce that particular will directly. It was a full-fledged, detailed will, but it had to go through a substantive process, which was very complicated, especially because minors were involved. As I said, that's a topic and a half, and we may do a separate episode on minors at some point.

That wraps up the discussion of the writ of execution. The upside is that if you have a foreign will from a jurisdiction where the process of ratifying, verifying or probating the will, whatever the term, involves the issuance of a court order, you have a very good chance of enforcing that will in the UAE by way of a writ of execution. That's an expedited process, very similar in many ways to enforcing a will registered in another emirate, after, of course, you've gone through the whole legalisation, attestation and translation process. So it's possible, but it really has to meet these criteria. We've dealt with many different countries, and I have to tell you that, at least in our practice, more countries than not do not follow a process like Scotland's, where the foreign will comes with the requisite foreign court order that allows the local courts to act on it.

Here are some of the substantive questions to work through when deciding which route to take. This is a roadmap to keep in mind, whether for the family, the heirs or the courts, because everyone has to go through this exercise. First, as we said: is there a will? Is it a foreign will, a UAE will, or is there no will at all? If there's a foreign will, is it enforceable on its own, or only as evidence? Was the deceased Muslim or non-Muslim? If Muslim, Islamic inheritance rules apply, with fixed shares, and bequests are generally limited to one third. If non-Muslim, the civil personal status law applies.

Sometimes, in inheritance proceedings, the will is also subject to a different law, so the courts will look at which law governs. If there's no will at all, the default under Article 11(2) applies: half goes to the spouse and half to the children, equally. Under Article 11(3), the heirs of a foreigner may also ask for their home country's law to apply instead, which then requires proof of that country's law.

Before you decide which path to take, work through this list of questions so that you don't overcomplicate the process. We've had cases where someone tried to enforce a will here that was subject to a different law, or where there was no will but the heirs tried to argue a foreign law, and it became quite complicated and expensive. So you need to be prepared, and applying a different law has to make sense, because it can be costly.

Then there's the big question: who are the heirs? This is where the applicable law is key. I don't want to go too far into this, because it has been covered in previous episodes, but it's a big one. Whether you have a will, what type of will, the religion and the governing law determine who the heirs are. For Muslims, there's a fairly complicated formula. For non-Muslims, it depends on which law applies: in some jurisdictions the heir is the spouse, in others only the children, and in others a fraction goes to the children and a fraction to the spouse.

Applying different laws can be incredibly costly. If you rely on UAE law, for example, the Dubai courts would ordinarily expect at least two male witnesses with direct knowledge of the family to testify about who the heirs are. Say a father passed away, leaving a daughter and a son, who come forward saying they're the only heirs. But there could also be a spouse, siblings, or the late father's parents still living. In cases like this, the court will ask for witnesses to come forward and testify that only those two children are the heirs under that person's applicable law.

That was the writ of execution. Now let's talk about the second path: filing the substantive case, the inheritance case. In Dubai, in particular, we have the Estates Court, a separate court focused specifically on inheritance cases. It has exclusive jurisdiction over disputes about real estate and all other assets that heirs may claim. Most reported cases involve UAE-based estates with no foreign element, but the principles apply more or less equally to foreign ones. Because this dedicated court has exclusive jurisdiction, if you file in a different court, and I'll give you examples of why people sometimes do, the case will ultimately be transferred here, which can further complicate the process.

Here's a real example from just last year: a commercial cassation case in which a dispute over inherited company shares was filed in the commercial court, because it related to company shares, namely how to divide the shares of a late shareholder. Ultimately, the Court of Cassation ruled that, because it concerned inherited company shares, it belonged in the estate court, even though the subject matter was commercial, and the case was sent back to the estate court.

Why this matters is that this was a decision of the Court of Cassation. To get there, you have to go through three stages: in the UAE, you file first in the Court of First Instance, then the Court of Appeal, and then the Court of Cassation. In this case, the heirs went through all three stages, all the way to the Court of Cassation, only to be told they had been in the wrong court all along. They had to restart the process and file in the estate court.

That's why I want to highlight this. As nuanced as it may sound, it's important. If you're filing anything that relates to an inheritance, be it real estate, a company dispute or even a personal status matter, if it relates to someone who has passed away, you need to file straight in the inheritance court. Otherwise, you risk losing all that time and having to start again, as in this case.

One more thing keeps coming up, and we've had it recently, so it's worth dedicating a little time to: creditors. What happens to creditors in all of this? When we talk about inheritance and heirs pursuing the transfer of assets, the heirs are only one type of interested party. Creditors may also have an interest in these assets. For example, real estate may be mortgaged, or company shares may come with various liabilities. How are these cases dealt with?

Once again, they must go through the estate court. And it's not that the heirs are responsible, or that the creditors have claims against the heirs. The creditors have claims against the estate, not the heirs. Say three heirs file an estate case to transfer the assets, five properties, but the mortgage exceeds the value of the properties, or there's still money in the bank account. The creditors cannot come after those three heirs, who are now registered as interested parties in the case. But the creditors are also interested parties, and in terms of priority, the creditors come first. So what happens to those five properties and, say, three bank accounts? The creditors' debts are paid off first, and the heirs receive only what remains in the pot. If there isn't enough left to go around for the heirs, which often happens, the heirs need not fear that the creditors will come after them. That question actually comes up quite a lot.

Now let's go through the process of filing a substantive case, as a parting roadmap. Step one is to diagnose the file. Before anything is filed, answer these questions. Is there a will, and is it a foreign will, a UAE will, or is there no will? Was the deceased Muslim or non-Muslim? Who are the heirs under UAE law, not just under the foreign will? What are the UAE assets, and are there other assets that someone else knows about? And will the heirs engage? Sometimes they won't. At a minimum, each will need to sign a power of attorney for their interests to be represented.

Step two is to gather, legalise, attest and translate all the documents. As I said before, you'll typically need the original foreign will and any probate grant or inheritance decision; the death certificate; family documents linking every heir to the deceased; the passports of the deceased and all heirs named in the documents; the title deeds, bank details or other documents establishing the UAE assets; and a power of attorney from every heir authorising UAE lawyers to represent their interests in the courts. Remember that each foreign document must be legalised abroad, attested by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs and translated into Arabic by a licensed translator. This is often the longest stage of the entire process.

Step three is to clear the non-resident hurdle. When the heirs live abroad, there are extra steps before you can file, because if the heirs have no identification number in the UAE, it's difficult for them to have their own court portal account, and it's also challenging for them to issue a power of attorney.

The UAE has now made it easier to issue powers of attorney, even for those who have never been to the UAE and therefore don't have what's called a unified identification number. By the way, anyone who enters the UAE, whether as a tourist on a visa or visa-free, is assigned a UID, a unified identification number. That number makes it easier for them, for example, to have their own court portal account if they want more visibility of what's happening on their behalf in the local courts. That's not possible for those who have never been to the UAE.

Still, I think the UAE is one of the easiest countries in which to issue, from abroad, a power of attorney for use in the UAE. Even if you've never been to the UAE, it's now possible, through the UAE Ministry of Justice and by video link, to issue a power of attorney that your lawyers and representatives can use in the UAE, without the heirs ever having to come here. That's a big benefit for many heirs, because, as I mentioned, heirs are often elderly and sometimes based very far away, in Australia, New Zealand, Latin America or the US. Travelling here just for inheritance proceedings can be very costly, and sometimes it's not even possible from a medical and physical standpoint. From what I've seen, the UAE is probably the only country that makes it so easy to issue a power of attorney, properly notarised by a UAE notary, that can be used by government agencies here.

Step four is to file either a writ of execution or an estate case. It's a court case either way, but depending on the type of will, as I said, it's a different type of application. Then you go through the court process. The writ of execution is the easiest. The estate case can be very lengthy, because it depends on which law is argued, how many heirs there are, whether there's a dispute between them, and so on. It can be quite complicated, and it often is.

Then, of course, execution and enforcement is a separate step. The order must be executed, and the authorities must actually receive the court's letters. Don't assume it will happen automatically; you need to be quite proactive. For real estate assets, you go directly to the Land Department with the court's letter clearly stating that those specific real estate assets are to be transferred to the heir. For bank accounts, you go directly to the banks.

But be careful, because even then, expect some scrutiny. Sometimes the authorities require additional documents. We had this recently: the court's decision somehow did not satisfy the Land Department, so we had to obtain an additional clarifying document before the Land Department would act on it. So even when you already have the enforcement order and the court's letters to transfer the assets, there can still be nuances in how the assets are finally transferred.

On timing, to wrap it all up: as I mentioned earlier, gathering, legalising and attesting documents is often the longest part. With a UAE will, it could be one month, at best. In other cases we've seen, it takes six to twelve months just to gather the documents before you're able to file. Once you have all the documents, if you file a writ of execution, you'll have a judgment you can enforce and start transferring assets on within days or a few weeks. If you have to file an estate case, it could take two to four months, and longer with witnesses or challenges by the heirs. That's in addition to the six to twelve months of gathering and legalising documents. Once you have the final decision, enforcing it, in other words transferring the assets to the specific heirs, typically takes about one month.

All in all, from our experience, if you're enforcing a foreign will, from gathering the documents to filing the case, obtaining the final decision and transferring the assets, it can take up to two years, or possibly even more.

Now let me quickly run through a few examples. I've already shared parts of these cases, so I won't go into too much detail. The easiest, as we know for a fact, is Scotland. Because of the way wills are probated in Scotland, they come wrapped in a court order. Those are the easiest to enforce, and you can enforce them through a writ of execution. In that case, once we had the documents, I think all the assets were transferred within three months. That was one of the best examples.

The Czech will, on the other hand, took us almost two years, and that was because of missing documents. We had missing originals, which required different powers of attorney in different jurisdictions, because the heir lived in a different country from where the will was issued. There were wrong documents: the heirs thought the document they gave us was the will, but it was in fact an inheritance decision, and we needed an additional document that had to come from the original jurisdiction and be legalised separately. We also had issues with notaries in other countries who would not notarise the powers of attorney we needed from the heirs to obtain the documents. In that case, the heir was also an elderly person based in another European country, outside the Czech Republic, so it was very difficult to collect all the documents in time and explain everything.

Ultimately, in that case, the court didn't want to act on the will itself, because it wanted to see a treaty, and the UAE does not have one with the Czech Republic. So we had to go through the full Monty. But once we submitted the documents, the court relied on all of them as a package of evidence. It did rely on the Czech inheritance decision, which, although refused as a writ, was accepted as primary evidence of heirship. The legalised and translated Czech will was also accepted, as were the death certificate and the Dubai title deed for the property we needed to transfer.

The twist in that particular case was that the Czech will expressly stated that it did not deal with UAE assets. That's why the Land Department and two trustee offices initially refused to act on it. What ultimately allowed us to move forward was going back to the Dubai Estates Court for its own order. The court's inheritance department issued a certificate confirming the deceased's share and instructed the Land Department to transfer the asset to the heir. So you see the kinds of complications that arise. After everything we went through, because the will itself did not cover UAE assets, the authorities would not act even on a court order until we obtained further clarification from the court.

We've also had several cases from Russia, with and without wills, where the family tried to use the Russian probate process, the Russian inheritance certificate, in the UAE. From what we concluded, in Russia, perhaps similarly to the Czech Republic, the will does not come wrapped in a court order that we could use for a writ of execution in the UAE, so it would have to go through the inheritance process, as we ultimately did with the Czech case.

Another quite interesting example involved a Ukrainian will. There were several wills. One was a local will that covered only the deceased's banking and financial assets in the UAE. All the other assets here, the real estate and corporate assets, were covered by a will in Ukraine. We were able to ratify and enforce the UAE will within about two months, and those assets were transferred. But the deceased's other interests remain subject to the Ukrainian will, which the heirs still have to try to enforce here.

In many of these cases, the heirs have to be prepared to be involved, and when there are multiple heirs who are not based in the UAE, they often don't want to be. Being involved means issuing a power of attorney to the lawyers in the UAE, signing engagement agreements and providing documents. With one heir, it's easier. With multiple heirs, it's not always possible to get them all on board. That's another nuance we encounter more often than not, especially when there are different wills in different jurisdictions. Conflict arises between heirs who feel that others are receiving more valuable assets, so nobody agrees to take part in the inheritance proceedings, and as a result, nothing moves. All the other assets are frozen, because you can't proceed with just one heir. You need all the heirs involved to file the inheritance proceedings and move things along.

Another example is from the US. An American woman passed away owning a Dubai property and a bank account. Her only child lives in the US, came to the UAE perhaps once or twice decades ago, and has no one here to help her figure things out. She has the title deeds and not much more knowledge of what is happening in the UAE. On top of that, what she has from her late mother are conflicting documents: a will and a trust that point at each other, and the UAE courts do not treat a foreign trust as a directly enforceable instrument.

We also obtained a final discharge order from the California courts confirming that the daughter was the sole distributee, but it wasn't worded in a way the local courts would act on. So here we have an American will and a trust that point at each other, and even a California order whose language could potentially have supplemented the will for the purposes of a writ of execution, but it didn't have the right language for the courts here to act on. Even with all these documents, we have to file a full estate case and use each document as evidence, which is a lengthier process. And because the heir is based in the US, it's taking longer. The US is not as formal a country in these matters as the UAE, so issuing powers of attorney, engaging lawyers and communicating with them is a lot less formal there, which makes it harder to get the discussion going and the documents produced in a form we can use in the UAE. That's a case we're dealing with right now, and further questions may still come up, because the late mother changed her name and marital status, and there are discrepancies in the documents. Once it's all presented to the court, there may be another round of questions that we'll need to be prepared to answer, and they may not be simple.

In conclusion, what should you do if you have a foreign will? Let's bring it all together. If you're dealing with a foreign will, or no will at all, and assets in the UAE, here's my advice. First, identify exactly what you have. A will, a probate grant, an inheritance decision and a court order are all different documents, so figure out exactly which one you have.

Then choose your path early. If your document is an enforceable court order, like a Scottish confirmation, try path one, the writ of execution. If not, you'll have to follow path two, the estate court.

Next, start the paperwork immediately: the originals, legalisation, attestation and translation. This is where most of the time goes.

Settle the religion and marital status questions early, before the court asks. Map out all the heirs under UAE law, build the document chain and line up your witnesses if needed. Make sure all the heirs are engaged and that, at a minimum, you have a power of attorney from each of them, because without it, assets and companies can freeze and the whole process will stall.

Remember to file in the right court, which has to be the Estates Court for all estate matters, even if they involve real estate or company shares.

And follow through to the last mile, because a court order is not a title deed. You'll still need to go through enforcement and take the specific documents to the various authorities and entities before the assets are actually transferred.

The best advice of all: if you own assets in the UAE, make a UAE will that covers all of them, including company shares. Your family will thank you for it.

That's all for this episode of Lawgical with Ludmila. If you found this episode useful and you like what we do, you can always find more on our website, lylawyers.com. We're also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and for the full experience, you can watch our video podcast on YouTube. Until next time, stay informed, stay safe and keep things Lawgical.