Challenges of authentication and certification of e-awards in Dubai and before the Dubai International Financial Centre courts: the electronic signature
Abstract
This article evaluates whether an electronic signature is sufficient to fulfil the authentication requirement stated under the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (New York, 1958) (NYC) article IV(1)(a) before the Dubai and Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) courts. Dubai is one of the few countries with two jurisdictions in one country. The party who is seeking the enforcement of the award in Dubai may enforce it before the Dubai or the DIFC courts, so the purpose of the comparison is to discuss whether the winning party may benefit from the DIFC. To achieve the objective of the study, this paper evaluates the ability to exclusively rely on secured electronic signatures to fulfil the requirement stated under article IV(1)(a), and to generally consider the validity of the electronic signature in the Dubai and DIFC courts.
Index words: United Arab Emirates; Dubai International Financial Centre; electronic signature; digital signature; arbitration; e-commerce; enforcement; arbitration agreements; Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards; Federal Law 1/2006 on Electronic Transactions and Commerce
Copyright, licence and acknowledgement
The author retains copyright and grants the publishers of the Review a licence to publish the article in the Review and to create and maintain digital copies on the internet at the discretion of the publisher and via third parties in subscription databases. The author warrants that they are the owner of all rights of copyright in the article.
Work published in the open access version of Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review on the SAS Open Journals System is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Where the author subsequently publishes the article, the author is requested to acknowledge the article first appeared in the Review, in whatever format it is subsequently published.
Those who contribute items to Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review retain author copyright in their work but are asked to grant two licences. One is a licence to the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study of the University of London, enabling us to reproduce the item in digital form, so that it can be made available for access online in the Open Journals System and repository and website. The terms of the licence which you are asked to grant to the University for this purpose are as follows:
'I grant to the University of London the irrevocable, non-exclusive royalty-free right to reproduce, distribute, display, and perform this work in any format including electronic formats throughout the world for educational, research, and scientific non-profit uses during the full term of copyright including renewals and extensions'
The other licence is for the benefit of those who wish to make use of items published online in IALS Student Law Review and stored in the e-repository. For this purpose we use a Creative Commons licence allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to your entry in Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review and/or SAS-SPACE, but they can't change them in any way or use them commercially.
For the avoidance of doubt, the author is not granted permission to publish the article in the format in which the Review publishes it. The publisher own the copyright to the text as it appears in the published journal. The author may only publish the article in word format or html, unless the author pays the publisher for a licence to re-publish as it is printed.
