Abu Dhabi Says ‘Jai Hindi’, Includes It As Its Third Official Court Language

Abu Dhabi will include Hindi as the third official court language after Arabic and English, The Times of India reports. The landmark move comes with the aim to improve access to Justice in the country.

The Abu Dhabi Judicial Department (ADJD), on Saturday (9 January) said it had extended the adoption of interactive statement forms of claims filed before courts to Hindi in labour cases.

The move focuses on helping Hindi speakers learn about the procedure of litigation, their duties and rights without any language barrier, Further, the judicial body said that the unified forms facilitating registration procedures are available on the ADJD website.

Official figures indicated that immigrants consist of two-thirds of the approximate nine million population of the UAE and the Indian community in the country is 2.5 million, 30 per cent of total population, making it UAE’s largest expatriate community.

The Undersecretary of the ADJD, Yousef Saeed Al Abri, said UAE, by adopting multilingual interactive forms for claim sheets, requests and problems, is aiming to promote judicial services in line with the Tomorrow 2021 plan and increasing transparency in litigation procedures.

"This is in addition to facilitating registration procedures to the public through simplified and easy forms and raising litigants' legal awareness via interactive forms of the statements of claims, to ensure access to the legal materials related to the subject of the dispute," the Khaleej Times quoted Al Abri as saying.

Al Abri said the first phase of the plan was launched in November 2018. Procedures required plaintiffs to translate the documents of the case in civil and commercial lawsuits into English when the defendant was a foreigner.