In a landmark declaration at the World Economic Forum, UAE Minister of State and Cabinet Secretary General Maryam bint Ahmed Al Hammadi revealed the nation has comprehensively overhauled its legal framework, updating approximately 90% of its laws and modifying thousands of legal articles over the past four years. This unprecedented regulatory revolution stems from a direct mandate by the UAE leadership to critically re-examine and modernize the nation’s entire body of legislation.
The initiative represents one of the most ambitious legal modernization projects globally, involving a systematic review to identify obsolete regulations for repeal and outdated statutes requiring amendment. The objective is to establish a governance system operating on the most contemporary and efficient legal principles.
A pivotal aspect of this transformation involves the strategic integration of artificial intelligence. The UAE is developing specialized AI systems to assist in legislative processes, though Minister Al Hammadi emphasized these tools won’t replace human judgment. “We don’t want only, for example, ChatGPT to draft for us a law,” she stated, outlining a more sophisticated approach where AI analyzes stakeholder feedback from social media and other channels to identify provisions requiring modification based on public sentiment.
The AI model incorporates fundamental constitutional safeguards and rule-of-law principles that cannot be compromised. It features mechanisms to prevent biased or harmful outcomes, ensuring all AI-generated recommendations remain traceable to established legal foundations rather than mere statistical patterns. While AI can identify non-compliances and recommend changes, it cannot impose penalties—human oversight remains paramount in the decision-making process.
The UAE is simultaneously preparing a new generation of legal professionals who blend expertise in law and technology. This includes developing regulatory data scientists capable of interpreting real-time legal performance metrics and engineers with regulatory knowledge who can translate complex legal text into publicly accessible language.
Minister Al Hammadi concluded that governments must embrace technological transformation rather than resist it, positioning the UAE’s approach as a model for 21st-century governance that balances technological innovation with constitutional safeguards and human oversight.