UAE has updated 90% of laws, thousands of articles in 4 years, says minister

The UAE has updated 90 per cent of its laws and has changed and modified thousands of articles in the past four years to run the country on modern and latest laws and regulations, a UAE minister said.

“There was a direction from the UAE leadership that we need to re-examine our laws. We looked to our regulations to see which ones are still valid and which ones need to be repealed... Within four years, 90 per cent of our laws have been updated as we did massive revolution in our regulatory framework. If we talk about the articles, thousands have been changed and modified,” said Maryam bint Ahmed Al Hammadi, Minister of State and Secretary General of the UAE Cabinet, during the World Economic Forum.

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The UAE also announced the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to modernise its laws and regulations.

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“(But) we don't want only, for example, ChatGPT to draft for us a law. We need to have a model that listens and speaks to social media. Any law that we issue, we need to listen to all our stakeholders to see what their feedback is about the law. Then the AI analyses and tells us that the article or law needs to be modified, as there are a lot of positive or negative comments about it. Then it will suggest changes in that specific law. We need that model to speak to the court to ensure that the law is being implemented correctly and the court ruling is compatible with the law or not.”

Federico Sturzenegger, minister of deregulation and state transformation, Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation of Argentina; Joel Kaplan, chief global affairs officer, Meta; and Yutaka Sasaki, representative director; president and CEO of NTT Data Group, also attended the panel discussion.

Principles for AI

She pointed out that some principles have been put in the AI model that the UAE is developing, and they cannot be compromised, such as the rule of law, foundation and constitutional safeguards.

For example, she added, whenever the model or the AI tool gives biased or harmful outcomes, there is a mechanism to stop it.

“We need all the AI output to be traceable to a legal basis, not only to statistical patterns. An AI candidate can tell you about the recommendations, outcomes, analyse for you, and tell you the red flag risk, but it will never bypass the procedures. For example, AI can tell us the non-compliances, but it will not impose penalties on the community,” the minister said, adding there are principles in the model regarding privacy and data protection as well.

“We believe that at this stage, AI can advise, but still, a human is in command, and this is very important for us at this stage.”

Maryam Al Hammadi stressed that the governments should not resist the change.

“We are now preparing the new generation of legal professionals to blend law and technology. We need to have regulatory data scientists who can handle and understand the data, and also know how the law is performing in real time. We need to have engineers with regulatory knowledge who can convert the complex law text into something people can understand,” she added.

Written by

Waheed Abbas

Waheed Abbas is Assistant Editor, covering real estate, aviation and other business stories that directly affect the lives of UAE consumers. He frequently reports human interest stories, too.