United Arab Emirates: Granted by Decree, and the Two Tracks Underneath

A reader in Japan who has followed the Gulf through headlines has been handed two stories about the United Arab Emirates, and both are lazy. The first is the morality tale: a rich desert autocracy with medieval family law, occasionally in the news for a tourist arrested over a kiss. The second is its mirror image, produced mostly by people selling something: a frictionless, post-national city-state where anything goes and the law has caught up with the skyline. This essay is not going to arbitrate between them, because the interesting thing about the Emirates is what neither story can hold.

Between November 2020 and April 2025 the country changed its criminal law and its family law more than once and in more than one direction. It repealed the provision that had allowed a man who killed a female relative to be sentenced as though he had done something less than murder. It took the criminal penalty off drinking, and off unmarried couples living together. It removed the clause that had framed a husband striking his wife as a right of correction. And it built, from nothing, an entire second body of family law — first in Abu Dhabi, then across the federation — under which a woman marries at twenty-one without a guardian’s signature, ends a marriage by telling a judge she wants it ended, keeps joint custody of her children until they are eighteen, and inherits on the same terms as her brother.

That is not a small list and it is not a public-relations exercise. Women live inside those provisions now; children are in shared custody under them; estates have been distributed by them. An essay that treats them as a brochure has decided in advance what a reform by an unelected government is allowed to be, which is not analysis. So the question this essay asks is a different one. Not whether the reforms are real. How the resulting rights are held — by whom, on what condition, and revocable by whom.

Precision matters here more than usual, because the widely repeated summary of the 2020 reforms is wrong in one specific and load-bearing way.

In November 2020 the President and Cabinet issued a package of decree-laws. The one amending the Penal Code removed the penalty for drinking, possessing or trading alcohol in authorised places for those over twenty-one; ended the offence of unmarried cohabitation; repealed the article that had let a man who killed his wife, daughter or sister receive a lesser sentence, so that such a killing is now charged as any other killing; struck out the provision that had recognised a husband’s chastisement of his wife; and decriminalised attempted suicide. A parallel decree-law amended the 2005 Personal Status Law so that a non-Muslim foreigner’s inheritance and divorce could be governed by the law of their own country. Within the same period the domestic-violence statute of 2019 was on the books, and it was itself replaced by a further decree-law in 2024.

What was not done is the part that gets repeated inaccurately. Consensual sexual intercourse outside marriage was not decriminalised. Under the Crimes and Penalties Law that replaced the 1987 code and took effect on 2 January 2022, it remains an offence carrying a minimum of six months. What changed is who can set the law in motion: a prosecution may now be brought only on the complaint of the husband or the woman’s guardian, and it lapses if the complaint is withdrawn. That is a real and consequential change — the state stepped back from initiating these cases, and a couple living together no longer commits an offence by doing so. But it is a change in the mechanism of enforcement, not in the status of the act. The offence was moved from the state’s hands into a husband’s or a guardian’s. For a woman whose husband or father is the person she most fears, that is not obviously an improvement, and an essay that writes it up as decriminalisation has lost the thing worth noticing.

The second half of the reform is more radical than the first, and it is the half that most reporting underplays. In November 2021 Abu Dhabi enacted a law on civil marriage and its effects, and a month later — before it had even come into force — amended it, deleting the word foreigners from its scope and replacing it with a broader formula covering persons addressed by the law, including non-Muslim citizens of the federation. It established a Civil Family Court that sits with a single judge, who may himself be non-Muslim, and hears in Arabic and English. In October 2022 the federation issued a Civil Personal Status decree-law, in force from 1 February 2023, applying to non-Muslims who are citizens and to non-Muslim foreigners resident in the country.

What these instruments hand a woman is worth stating item by item, because the list is the argument. She may marry at twenty-one on her own declaration before a judge; no guardian signs, and no witnesses are required. Either spouse may end the marriage by saying so, without alleging fault, proving harm, or passing through a reconciliation committee. Custody after divorce is joint and runs to eighteen, with either parent able to ask a court to vary it in the child’s interest. Where there is no will, half the estate goes to the surviving spouse and half is divided equally among the children, daughters and sons alike. Her testimony carries the same weight as a man’s. She may register a will directing her assets wherever she wishes.

A reader here should sit with that for a moment, because several of those provisions are further from Japanese law than a reader expects. Japan permitted no joint parental custody at all after divorce until April 2026, when the Civil Code amendment the Diet passed in May 2024 finally came into force; the Emirati civil track had it three years earlier. Japan still requires married couples to share one surname. The Emirati civil track is not a lesser settlement dressed up. On its own terms it is, for the people it covers, a generous one.

The phrase to hold on to is for the people it covers.

The civil regime is bounded by religion, not by nationality. The federal civil law names its subjects as non-Muslims who are citizens and non-Muslim foreigners. Alongside it, and in force from 15 April 2025, sits a new federal Personal Status Law replacing the law of 2005, which applies where a citizen party is Muslim. Academic analysis of how the two regimes interlock reaches the conclusion the instruments themselves make plain: a Muslim citizen of the Emirates has no federal civil alternative. Abu Dhabi’s courts have on occasion admitted Muslim foreigners to the civil court on the basis of a second nationality, and the boundary at that edge is genuinely unsettled. At the centre it is not unsettled at all.

So it is worth asking what the Sharia-based track looks like after its own 2024 rewrite, rather than assuming it stood still. It did not. Custody by the mother, which under the old law ended when a boy turned eleven and a girl thirteen, now runs to eighteen — a substantial gain, and one that moved the two tracks closer together. Other provisions were clarified in women’s favour. A woman who wants to marry a man her guardian refuses can go to court, and where the refusal is unjustified and she confirms her acceptance of the man and the dower, the court is to conclude the marriage itself.

But the guardian remains an element of the marriage contract rather than a formality she may waive, which means the default position is that a Muslim Emirati woman marries with a man’s signature and departs from that default by litigating. And the article governing maintenance retains, and extends, the conditions under which she loses it: a wife forfeits maintenance if she withholds herself from her husband, if she refuses to move into or live in the marital home, or — this is new in 2024 — if she refuses to travel with him, in each case absent a lawful excuse. Read plainly, that provision prices refusal. It does not compel anything; it attaches a financial consequence to a no. A woman on the civil track can end the whole marriage without giving a reason. A woman on the other track can lose her maintenance for declining a journey.

This is the two-track system the chamber’s Canadian essay met from the other end. There, the argument was that official pluralism can leave the women inside the most restrictive communities with the least practical recourse, precisely because the state declines to intervene. The Emirati version is the same shape with the polarity reversed: the state has not declined to intervene, it has legislated a liberal regime in detail — and then defined its beneficiaries by religion, so that the women furthest inside the system are the ones the new law does not reach.

Every instrument named so far is a decree-law, and it is worth being exact about what that means rather than gesturing at authoritarianism.

Under the federal constitution, a draft law is prepared by the Council of Ministers and put to the Federal National Council, which debates it and may accept it, propose amendments, or reject it. The Council of Ministers then submits it to the President for presentation to the Supreme Council — the rulers of the seven emirates — for ratification, and the President signs and promulgates it. The Federal National Council’s view does not bind that sequence. And a separate article provides that when the Supreme Council is between meetings and a law cannot wait, the President and the Council of Ministers may promulgate it together as a decree having the force of law.

The Federal National Council itself has forty members. Twenty are appointed by the rulers of the emirates. Twenty are elected by an electoral college, itself selected, which in the 2023 election numbered just under four hundred thousand people. There are no political parties; every candidate stands as an independent. Half the electoral college were women. This is not nothing — it is a wider franchise than the country had fifteen years earlier, and the Council debates, questions ministers and shapes text. It is also not a legislature in the sense the word carries in a Japanese sentence, and the reforms this essay has described did not pass through it as bills that it could have stopped.

None of that makes the reforms fake. It does describe their tenure. A right that exists because a cabinet and a council of rulers decided it should exist is held on the terms of that decision. The people who hold it were not asked, did not campaign for it, and are not organised around it. There is no constituency with a name that would be visibly defeated if it were narrowed, because there was no constituency that won it.

The clearest illustration is the smallest one. In January 2023 Dubai suspended the thirty per cent municipality tax on alcohol sales and made the personal drinking licence free. The suspension was extended, and then it ended: the tax returned on 1 January 2025, communicated, as far as this essay could establish, through licensed retailers rather than in a published instrument. Nobody’s rights were violated. Nothing was promised and broken. That is exactly the point. A relaxation that arrives as an administrative decision departs as one, and the people living under it learn of both from a shop.

A second illustration carries more weight. Children of an Emirati father acquire citizenship. Children of an Emirati mother and a foreign father do not; their mother may apply on their behalf once certain conditions are met, and the child may apply in their own name at eighteen. An entitlement and an application are not two speeds of the same thing. One is held; the other is requested, and can be declined, and can wait. The reform that extended the possibility to Emirati mothers was itself announced as a grant. It improved the position of a great many families. It did not change the grammar.

The chamber has met this grammar before. Its Chinese essay found a population whose reproductive lives were reorganised twice within one lifetime by the same instrument, which reversed itself without ever conceding that the decision had belonged to anyone else. Its Turkish essay found a state that joined a convention on violence against women and then left it by the same executive act that had joined it, with no vote in between either time. The Emirati case is not a repressive version of those. It is the liberal version, which is why it is harder to see: the instrument is being used to widen rather than to narrow, and the reader who approves of the direction stops asking about the instrument.

Any essay about intimacy, marriage and law in the Emirates that does not reach the household worker has decided to write about a minority of the women in the country. The UN Population Division’s 2024 estimates put the foreign-born at around seventy-four per cent of the Emirati population, among the largest such shares anywhere. A very large number of those people are women employed inside other people’s homes, and the law that governs them is a different law again.

Domestic work sits outside the 2021 federal law on employment relations. It has its own decree-law, issued in September 2022, in force that December, replacing a 2017 statute and itself amended in 2023. Its provisions are not nothing. A worker is entitled to at least twelve hours of rest a day, of which at least eight must be consecutive; to no fewer than thirty days of paid annual leave; to keep her own passport and identity papers, which an employer may not retain; and to be recruited without being charged for it. Disputes go first to the ministry. The official government portal states these entitlements plainly, in public, as law.

What the essay cannot do is tell a reader how far that text reaches into a particular kitchen, and it will not pretend otherwise. The International Labour Organization, which does not disaggregate the Emirates in its regional material, records that domestic work accounts for around twelve per cent of total employment across the Arab States and about a third of women’s employment there, and describes the structural features of the sector in the region: exclusion from general labour legislation, and a sponsorship arrangement under which a worker’s legal presence is tied to a single employer, so that leaving a bad household can mean losing lawful status rather than changing jobs. No Gulf state has ratified the ILO’s convention on domestic workers.

Two things follow and both should be said. The first is that a separate statute is not by itself a lesser one — domestic work genuinely differs from factory work, and several countries legislate for it separately. The second is that a right which exists on paper and depends for its exercise on not being deported is a right of the kind this whole essay is about, held at its thinnest. The workers on the receiving end of the 2022 decree-law are the group in the country furthest from any mechanism that could defend it, and they are also the group whose labour makes the two-income Emirati and expatriate household possible. That is the economics underneath the intimacy, and it is not a footnote to the reforms. It is the floor they stand on.

Set beside this, the Japanese sequence looks almost absurdly slow, and the chamber has already told it: a Penal Code written in 1907, untouched on sexual offences for a hundred and ten years, revised in 2017 in a way that survivors immediately called insufficient because it left the age of consent at thirteen and kept the requirement of assault or intimidation; then, in the spring of 2019, a run of acquittals in cases most people reading about them could not comprehend as acquittals; then a woman standing outside Tokyo Station with flowers, then the same thing in every prefecture in the country, month after month, for years; then a survivors’ organisation with a name, submissions, a Justice Ministry study group, a Legislative Council subcommittee; then, in June 2023, a revision that renamed the offence around consent rather than force, enumerated the circumstances in which consent cannot be formed, raised the age of consent to sixteen and lengthened the limitation period.

It took a hundred and sixteen years and it exhausted the people who did it. Some of them paid for it in their own names, in public, more than once. A reader who wants to conclude that a decree is simply more efficient has an easy case to make and the essay is not going to pretend otherwise.

But look at what the long route left behind. It left a body that can be addressed — a Diet, with members who can be lobbied, questioned and voted against. It left a record of who said what during the deliberations. It left an organisation that still exists, with a membership and a mailing list and institutional memory of how the last one was won. If a future government proposed to move the age of consent back to thirteen, there is a specific room in which that proposal would have to be made, specific people who would have to make it under their own names, and a constituency already assembled that would be watching the room. None of that is a guarantee. Rights won through legislatures are rolled back through legislatures, as this chamber has found on more than one continent. It is not a guarantee. It is an address.

The strongest case against everything above is that it is a provincialism dressed as a principle. Put at full strength it runs like this. The essay has taken the political form familiar to its author and named it as the thing that makes a right secure, when the record is that the form guarantees nothing. Japanese women had the vote for seventy-seven years before the age of consent moved off thirteen. A Japanese woman who marries still cannot keep her surname, and the reason is a legislature. Meanwhile an Emirati woman on the civil track can walk out of a marriage this afternoon without a reason and keep half the estate, and she can do it because an unelected cabinet decided she could. Is a right she can actually exercise today worth less than a right she might have been able to campaign for? The suggestion is close to insulting, and the essay should feel the force of it.

A second version of the objection is narrower and harder. A right that has never been contested is not thereby insecure; it may simply be uncontested. The Emirati civil regime is not a fragile concession extracted from a reluctant state. It is the state’s own project, built deliberately over four years, tied to its economic strategy and to its standing, and defended by it. Strategic interest can hold a right in place at least as firmly as a constituency can, and often longer.

The essay concedes the second point almost entirely and the first in large part. What survives is narrower than the objection assumes, and it is the finding. The difference between a right won through a legislature and a right issued by decree is not in the quality of the right, its speed, or the sincerity of those who granted it. It is in what the holder can do on the day somebody moves to take it back. One holder has an address, a procedure, a name to shout and a history of having won once. The other has the same office that granted it. That is the whole of the claim, and it does not require a single sentence ranking one country above another. The chamber’s Mexican essay reached the shape of this from a democracy: a right established by a court that most of the people it protects did not vote for and cannot easily defend, in a country where the physical danger it was meant to address did not move. The instrument that delivers a right shapes how it is held, and that is true under any flag.

This house sells evenings in which the terms are written down before anything begins, and in which the person providing the evening has no standing to reinterpret them afterwards. In the vocabulary of this essay, that is a right granted by an instrument the holder does not control. The house wrote the form. The house could change the form. A woman who books an evening is, structurally, on the receiving end of exactly the arrangement this essay has spent three thousand words describing, and it would be dishonest to publish the argument without saying so.

What the house can say in its own defence is narrow and should stay narrow. The instrument is legible: it is written, it is the same for everyone, and a person can read it before deciding. That is not a franchise. It is the minimum condition under which a granted right can be checked by the person holding it, and the house’s claim is that legibility is worth something even where consent to the rules is not on offer.

What the house may not claim follows directly. It may not present itself as a model of anything for a legal system. It may not suggest that reading a form teaches a woman what to do when a right is withdrawn in a country, a workplace or a marriage. And it may not use the material of this essay — the domestic worker in particular — as a backdrop against which its own product looks generous. That woman is not a contrast. She is the person for whom every argument in this essay is most nearly literal, and the house has nothing to offer her.

This essay does not claim that the Emirati reforms were insincere, cosmetic, or aimed only at foreigners and investment. They were plainly aimed in part at foreign residents and at the country’s attractiveness, and they were also plainly real, and both things are true at once; the matrix row that prompted this piece proposed the first and the essay has declined to leave out the second.

It does not claim that the country is repressive as a whole or liberal as a whole, and it does not offer any characterisation of Emirati society, Emirati men, or Islam. Its subject is a set of legal instruments and the structure of entitlement they create, not a people.

It does not claim any prevalence. It does not say how many marriages are contracted on the civil track, how often a guardian’s refusal is overridden, how often maintenance is withheld under the article that conditions it, how often an employer retains a passport, or how far any of the published entitlements reach in practice. Enforcement and outcome data that the essay could check are not published, and where it has described the reach of a provision it has described the text.

It does not claim that the Japanese sequence is a model. A hundred and sixteen years is not a strategy, and the people who closed the gap were not compensated for the time. Nor does it claim that a legislature secures a right; it claims only that it leaves an address.

Its limits are these. Every instrument is described by its principal features from official publication, official government summary and professional legal commentary, not from a certified translation of the gazette, and article numbers for the 2024 Personal Status Law are taken from practitioner analyses that agree with one another but that this essay could not check against the Arabic original. The boundary of the Abu Dhabi civil court’s jurisdiction over Muslim foreigners is genuinely unsettled in the case law and is described as unsettled. The regional figures on domestic work do not disaggregate the Emirates. The Dubai alcohol measures could not be traced to a published instrument in either direction and are treated as administrative acts on the public record. And the essay is written from outside both societies it compares, in a chamber whose standing method is to use one country as a mirror for another rather than as a verdict on it.