Training in Abu Dhabi
by Alain Nuée
Jean Raymond Lemaire and I were appointed by ENM to lead a training on expertise for Emirati trainers on 17, 18 and 19 April 2018 in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates Federation.
The limited audience of three expert officials and three civil and commercial judges was particularly interested in our presentation of the French system and the harmonisation processes within Council of Europe and EU member states
The very intense exchanges that we had with the participants allowed us to discover a judicial system close to ours for civil and commercial matters, due to the filiation of the law of the Emirates with Napoleonic law via Egyptian law.
In terms of expertise, we found the same problems as in European countries. On the other hand, we were surprised by the fact that the appointment of the expert is not done by the judge who orders the expertise but by an ad hoc service of the Ministry of Justice composed of 17 official experts who evaluate the 300 experts who are not officials.
Perceived as specialists in expertise in Europe, we were invited by the director of the ministry in charge of civil official servant personnel who recruits the experts, to evaluate the system of expertise of the emirate of Abu Dhabi. Having subordinated our opinion to a more in-depth audit, we nevertheless drew attention to the difficulties that could arise from the adoption of the common law system outside the cultural and institutional context which in Great Britain guarantees the independence of the expert witness.
Our interlocutors seemed to us very tempted to leave the system of the technical expert because of the difficulties encountered to recruit the quality experts who are essential to deal with the disputes related to the realization of extreme constructions and to the use of techniques of avant-garde more and more complex in a country which astonishes by the quality of its infrastructures and a grandiose urbanism.
We hope that this intervention will be followed up and may give other members of the EEEI the opportunity to contribute their experience for a longer training whose outlines will have to be defined after an additional audit. This experience of two of us outside the European zone is perhaps the first step towards the recognition of the EEEI on a worldwide scale!
