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By Ahmed Yehia Hamdalla — Partner, SAT & Co. Advocates and Legal Consultants, Dubai
Among the opening provisions of the Civil Procedure Code promulgated by Federal Decree-Law No. 42 of 2022 is one that is easy to read past and hard to recover from once missed. Article 3 is not concerned with the mechanics of litigation or the ordering of hearings; it settles a prior question: whether a person aggrieved by a decision of a public authority reaches the courtroom at all. It provides that an action for the annulment of an administrative decision is not admissible after sixty days from the date on which the decision was published, notified to the person concerned, or proved to have come to his certain knowledge. The rule applies before the federal courts and the Dubai Courts alike, since the Code is in force before both, and it stands in the same opening chapter as Article 2 on interest, as if the legislator were saying that time, like interest, is a condition of the action itself and not merely one of its procedures.
The administrative decision to which the Article refers is the expression by a public authority of its binding will, in the exercise of a power conferred by laws and regulations, with the intention of producing a legal effect: a licence refused or withdrawn, a fine imposed, a bid excluded, a registration struck off, a public employee disciplined, a plot of land reallocated. Contracts concluded by the administration, and its physical acts, fall outside that scope and are contested through the ordinary civil action with its ordinary limitation period. The Article, moreover, governs the action for annulment alone, that is, the request that the court strike the decision down and erase its effects. A claim for compensation for the damage the decision has caused is a different action governed by the general rules; but it is no back door for a litigant who has missed the time for annulment, because the most it can give is a sum of money, not the restoration of the position that existed before the decision.
The period has three possible starting points: publication, which is the route for regulatory decisions addressed to the public at large; notification, which is the route for individual decisions addressed to a named person; and certain knowledge, the safeguard that closes the road to a person who learned of the decision without either. The words "certain knowledge" are demanding and leave no room for supposition or presumption: the knowledge that sets the clock running is real knowledge, the burden of proving it lies on the authority, and it must embrace the content of the decision sufficiently for the person concerned to determine his legal position towards it. A person who has dealt with the decision in any way, by objecting to it, paying what it imposed or referring to it in correspondence, should expect that correspondence to be produced as proof of the date of his knowledge.
The second paragraph of the Article then introduces what lawyers call the administrative grievance. The period is interrupted by a grievance or objection lodged with the competent administrative authority in accordance with the procedures laid down in the relevant legislation; the authority must decide within sixty days of its filing; a rejection must be reasoned; sixty days of silence are deemed a rejection; and the period for bringing the action runs from the express or implied rejection, as the case may be. Three points in this wording deserve attention. First, the legislator said "interrupted", not "suspended", and interruption means that a fresh, full period of sixty days begins again, not that the remainder of the first period resumes its course. Second, interruption can only operate on a period that is still running: a grievance lodged after the sixty days have expired revives nothing and reopens nothing. Third, the grievance that counts is the one lodged in accordance with the procedures prescribed by the legislation governing the authority concerned; a message to a customer-service mailbox is not a grievance within the meaning of the Article where the law has prescribed a form, a committee or a fee for it. Nor should the person concerned rely on a second grievance against the same decision to turn the clock back.
An example makes the arithmetic plain. A decision is notified on 1 March; a grievance is lodged on 20 March, interrupting the period; the authority remains silent, so its silence is deemed an implied rejection on 19 May; the statement of claim must then be filed within the following sixty days, that is, by 18 July. What preserves the period is the registration of the claim with the court within it, as Article 4 of the same Code provides for any step that is taken by filing; a legal notice, the opening of negotiations or a letter to a higher authority preserves nothing.
The sanction for missing the period is inadmissibility of the action, not its dismissal: the court does not examine the legality of the decision at all, and the decision, sound or defective, becomes immune from annulment for good. The person concerned should assume that the court will take the point of its own motion even if the authority does not raise it, for this is a time limit which the courts, in annulment actions, treat as a matter of public order.
The practical conclusion for anyone aggrieved by an administrative decision is to record the date of notification on the day it is received; to lodge a grievance only through the channel the law prescribes, keeping proof of its date; to treat silence as a rejection on the sixtieth day rather than wait for a letter that may never come; to file the action within the following sixty days; and to include the claim for compensation in the same statement of claim. For the administrative authority the Article carries a corresponding lesson: to notify its decisions properly, to give reasons when it rejects a grievance, as the law requires, and to keep evidence of the date of notification, because the burden of proving the day on which the period began falls on it.
Sources: Federal Decree-Law No. 42 of 2022 Promulgating the Civil Procedure Code, Articles 2, 3 and 4, as published on the UAE Legislation portal (the Arabic text prevailing in case of conflict). This article is general commentary and not legal advice on any specific case.