Confidentiality in Onshore UAE Arbitration — What Federal Law No. 6 of 2018 Actually Protects

Parties choose arbitration partly for its discretion — but privacy and confidentiality are different things, and onshore UAE law treats them differently. The Federal Arbitration Law (Law No. 6 of 2018, as amended by Law No. 15 of 2023) keeps the hearing room closed and prevents publication of the award, yet it does not, in terms, impose a sweeping duty of confidentiality over every document and communication in the reference. Where the protection actually comes from — statute, institutional rules, or the clause you drafted — is what decides whether your dispute stays private in practice. This guide works through each layer, the exceptions that most often surprise clients, and how to draft so that confidentiality holds when it matters.

1. Which arbitrations this covers — and why the seat decides

This guide concerns arbitrations seated onshore in the UAE, governed by Federal Law No. 6 of 2018 as amended. It does not govern arbitrations seated in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) or the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), each of which is a separate common-law jurisdiction with its own arbitration statute and its own confidentiality provisions. The DIFC Arbitration Law and the ADGM Arbitration Regulations approach confidentiality differently again, and an assumption imported from one regime can be wrong in another.

The point that trips parties up is that the seat — the legal home of the arbitration — is what fixes the applicable law, not the nationality of the parties, the governing law of the contract, or the physical place of the hearing. A dispute between two mainland companies heard in a Dubai hotel but seated in the DIFC is a DIFC arbitration for these purposes. Before analysing confidentiality at all, identify the seat with precision.

2. Where the duty of confidentiality comes from

There is no single, comprehensive confidentiality code in the Federal Arbitration Law. Instead, the protection a party enjoys is assembled from three sources, and the strength of the protection depends on which of them are engaged:

• The statute — which secures the privacy of hearings and restricts publication of the award, but stops short of a general duty over all documents and information.
• The institutional rules — which, in their modern form, add a broad confidentiality obligation binding the parties, the tribunal and the institution.
• The arbitration agreement (and related undertakings) — which can define confidential information, extend it to non-parties, and tailor the carve-outs.

In an ad hoc arbitration under the Federal Law alone, only the first source is in play, and it is narrower than most clients assume. In an institutional arbitration under modern rules, all three combine into a robust regime. The single most consequential drafting decision for confidentiality is therefore whether to adopt a modern institutional ruleset at all.

3. Privacy of the hearing

Privacy is the aspect the statute secures most clearly. Hearings are conducted in private; a stranger to the reference has no right to attend, and the tribunal controls who is present. Privacy is valuable but limited — it governs the hearing room, not the wider flow of information. It does not, by itself, stop a party telling a third party what happened at the hearing, nor does it reach the documents and correspondence generated outside it. Privacy and confidentiality are frequently conflated in submissions; keeping them distinct is the beginning of the analysis.

4. The tribunal and the institution

Arbitrators and arbitral institutions are ordinarily subject to confidentiality obligations, whether by the applicable rules, their appointment terms, or professional duty. The tribunal is expected not to disclose the parties' materials or the deliberations, and institutions administer cases on confidential terms. Where the arbitration is administered under the DIAC 2022 or arbitrateAD 2024 rules, these obligations are express and extend to the institution's staff. The practical takeaway is that the risk of disclosure rarely comes from the tribunal or institution; it comes from the parties, from third parties, and from downstream court proceedings.

5. Witnesses and experts

Witnesses of fact and independent experts are not parties to the arbitration agreement, and are not automatically bound by whatever confidentiality regime binds the parties. That gap matters: an expert who also advises other clients, or a witness who is an employee of a group company, can be a route by which information escapes. The orthodox solution is to bind them by undertaking — confidentiality provisions in the expert's engagement terms and, where appropriate, written undertakings from witnesses — so that the protection travels with the information rather than stopping at the parties' door.

6. Documents disclosed or generated in the arbitration

This is the category where the statute's silence bites hardest, and where a distinction repays attention. There is a difference between (i) documents generated for the arbitration — pleadings, written submissions, witness statements, expert reports, transcripts — and (ii) pre-existing documents merely produced in it. Modern institutional rules typically extend confidentiality to both, restricting a party's use of what it receives to the purposes of the arbitration itself. Absent such rules or an express clause, a party relying on a general duty over produced documents is on weaker ground. Where sensitive material must be produced, parties should consider confidentiality rings, redaction, and express directions from the tribunal governing use and return of documents.

7. The award and its reasons

Here the statute is protective. An arbitral award may not be published, in whole or in part, without the written consent of the parties. That prevents an institution or a counterparty from making the outcome public unilaterally, and it is a meaningful protection for a party that has prevailed but does not want the result known. Two qualifications matter in practice. First, consent is often given for anonymised or redacted publication where an institution wishes to build a body of reasoning; a party should decide its position on that consciously. Second, the protection attaches to the award as a document — it does not, by itself, keep the underlying facts private if the award is later placed before a court.

8. The court-proceedings exception

The most common way a confidential arbitration becomes partly public is through the courts. An award creditor who must ratify and enforce, or an award debtor who seeks to annul, takes the dispute into the onshore court system, whose proceedings are not designed around arbitral confidentiality. Pleadings, and potentially parts of the award and the reasoning, can enter the public record. The confidentiality regime does not prevent a party invoking the court's supervisory or enforcement jurisdiction; the tension is inherent. Parties for whom secrecy is paramount should factor this into their strategy from the outset, including the choice of seat, and should take advice on what can be sealed or redacted in any court application.

9. The recognised carve-outs

Even a robust confidentiality regime yields to certain competing interests. The carve-outs typically recognised, whether expressly in the rules or as a matter of principle, include:

• disclosure compelled by law, by a court order, or by a regulator, or required to comply with a listing or audit obligation;
• disclosure reasonably necessary to establish or protect a legal right, or to enforce or challenge the award;
• disclosure to a party's professional advisers, insurers and, on appropriate terms, funders, who are themselves bound to keep it confidential;
• disclosure with the consent of the other party or parties.

A well-drafted clause states the carve-outs it wants rather than leaving them to be argued, so that a party can make necessary disclosures without breaching its own confidentiality undertaking.

10. The data-protection overlap

Confidentiality and data protection are distinct obligations that run in parallel. The materials in an arbitration routinely contain personal data, and the handling of that data engages the UAE's data-protection framework independently of any confidentiality clause. A confidentiality regime does not discharge data-protection duties, and compliance with one does not guarantee compliance with the other. In cross-border references — where documents, servers and reviewers may sit in different jurisdictions — the transfer and processing of personal data needs to be considered on its own terms.

11. Remedies for breach

Where confidentiality is breached, the response depends on the source of the duty. A breach of a confidentiality obligation in the arbitration agreement or in the rules is itself a matter the tribunal can address — by direction, by drawing consequences in costs, and in principle by an award of damages where loss can be shown. Urgent cases may call for injunctive relief from a court to restrain a threatened disclosure. The practical difficulty is usually proof of loss once information is out; the better protection is preventive drafting rather than after-the-event remedy.

Third parties, non-signatories and group companies

Confidentiality problems often arise not from the parties but from those around them. A party to an arbitration will frequently need to share information with entities that are not signatories to the arbitration agreement — a parent or subsidiary that is the real economic actor, an insurer indemnifying the claim, a prospective purchaser conducting due diligence, or a lender whose facility is affected by the dispute. None of these is automatically bound by the confidentiality regime, and each disclosure is a potential leak.

The disciplined approach is to treat every such disclosure as permissible only where it falls within a recognised carve-out (for example, disclosure to advisers and insurers on confidential terms) and to paper it accordingly — by non-disclosure agreement, by confidentiality provisions in the relevant engagement, and by keeping a record of what was disclosed to whom and why. Where a group structure means that the entity conducting the arbitration is not the entity holding the information, that mismatch should be identified at the outset, not discovered mid-reference.

Parallel proceedings and information flows

Confidentiality is placed under particular strain where the same facts give rise to more than one set of proceedings — a related arbitration, court litigation, a regulatory investigation, or criminal process. Information generated in the confidential arbitration may be sought for use in the parallel matter, and a party may be caught between a confidentiality obligation in one forum and a disclosure obligation in another.

The tension is generally resolved in favour of a genuine legal compulsion — a party ordered by a court or regulator to disclose does not breach its confidentiality duty by complying — but the boundaries are fact-sensitive, and a party should not assume that the mere existence of a parallel matter licenses free use of the arbitration materials. Where parallel proceedings are foreseeable, the arbitration agreement can address information-sharing expressly, and the tribunal can be asked for directions governing the use of its record.

Onshore, DIFC and ADGM compared

Because the seat governs, it is worth holding the three UAE regimes side by side. Onshore, under the Federal Arbitration Law, privacy of hearings and non-publication of the award are secured by statute, but a general duty of confidentiality depends on the rules and the clause. The DIFC and the ADGM, as common-law jurisdictions, approach the question through their own arbitration statutes and case law, and their supervisory courts operate in English. The practical consequence is that two arbitrations on identical facts can have materially different confidentiality outcomes depending only on the seat chosen in the clause. A party for whom confidentiality is a priority should treat the seat decision as, in part, a confidentiality decision.

The statutory position in more detail

It is worth being precise about what the Federal Arbitration Law does and does not say, because much confusion flows from imprecision. The statute secures the privacy of the hearing: the arbitral hearings are conducted in private, and it is for the tribunal, controlling its own procedure, to decide who may be present beyond the parties, their representatives and those assisting the tribunal. Separately, the statute protects the award from publication without the written consent of the parties. Those are meaningful but bounded protections.

What the statute does not contain is a free-standing, general obligation on the parties not to use or disclose the documents, submissions and information generated in the reference for purposes outside it. In common-law arbitration that obligation is often supplied by an implied duty of confidentiality; onshore UAE law does not articulate an equivalent implied term in the same way. The gap is not a licence to disclose — other duties (contractual, professional, data-protection) still bite — but it means a party cannot simply assume the statute will restrain a counterparty's use of the arbitration materials. That restraint has to come from the rules or the clause.

Waiver and loss of confidentiality

Confidentiality can be lost as well as protected. It may be waived expressly, by consent to publication or disclosure; and it may be lost in substance where a party itself puts the arbitration into the public domain — for instance by issuing a press statement about the dispute, or by deploying the award or the pleadings in unrelated proceedings. A party that treats confidentiality as important should be disciplined about its own public statements, because it is difficult to insist on a counterparty's silence about a dispute the complaining party has itself publicised. Consistency of conduct is part of preserving the protection.

Protecting confidentiality in enforcement and annulment

Because the court stage is where confidentiality is most exposed, it deserves a practical strategy rather than resigned acceptance. A party bringing or defending an enforcement, ratification or annulment application should consider, and take local advice on, the measures available to limit exposure: applying for confidentiality or sealing orders where the court permits them; filing redacted versions of sensitive exhibits; and confining the material put before the court to what is strictly necessary to the relief sought. The extent to which onshore courts will accommodate such requests is a matter of the court's own procedure and discretion, and it should be tested early rather than assumed. The broader lesson is that the interaction between arbitration confidentiality and open-court principles is managed, not avoided.

A practical protocol for in-house and legal teams

• Fix the seat with care — it determines the confidentiality regime — and treat the seat decision as, in part, a confidentiality decision.
• Adopt a modern institutional ruleset to secure a broad confidentiality baseline, and add a tailored clause where the matter is especially sensitive.
• Extend confidentiality to representatives, experts, witnesses, insurers and funders by back-to-back undertaking.
• Map, at the outset, which group entity holds the information and which is party to the arbitration, and paper any necessary internal disclosures.
• Handle personal data in compliance with data-protection law, independently of the confidentiality regime, including on cross-border transfer.
• Plan for the court stage: know in advance what can be sealed or redacted, and disclose to the court only what is necessary.
• Be consistent: avoid public statements that undercut a later insistence on the counterparty's confidentiality.

12. Drafting for the confidentiality you actually want

Because the statute is not a complete code, the clause carries the weight. A confidentiality provision that does its job will usually:

• define confidential information and the permitted purposes for which it may be used;
• capture the existence of the dispute, not merely its contents;
• bind representatives, experts, witnesses and funders by back-to-back undertaking;
• set out the carve-outs the parties need (legal compulsion, protection of rights, enforcement, consent);
• address personal data and cross-border transfer expressly; and
• survive the making of the award and the termination of the contract.

For most commercial parties, adopting a modern institutional ruleset is the simplest route to a strong baseline, with a tailored clause layered on top where the sensitivity of the matter justifies it.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Choosing an arbitration seat in the UAE — onshore vs DIFC vs ADGM
• Arbitration vs litigation in the UAE — when to choose which
• The arbitrateAD 2024 Rules — a complete guide

This guide is general information on the law as we understand it and is not legal advice. For advice on a specific arbitration matter, please contact us. Last updated: 30 July 2026.