If you’re used to reading about counterfeit litigation in the US, UK or India, the UAE looks different. Search for “UAE trademark court cases 2025” and you won’t find a long list of widely reported civil judgments. That’s not because counterfeiting isn’t being tackled. It’s because the UAE’s model puts the weight on criminal prosecution and administrative enforcement, customs seizures, inspection campaigns, Department of Economic Development and regulator action, rather than brand owners slugging it out in open court for years. Two rulings from 2025 show both sides of that machinery working, and the seizure numbers show why the case count alone understates how much enforcement is actually happening.

The law behind the crackdown

UAE trademark protection sits under Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021 on Trademarks. It replaced the older framework, and it’s the law every 2025 case below was decided under.

Two articles matter most for counterfeiting specifically. Article 49 covers forging or imitating a registered trademark in a way that could confuse the public: imprisonment plus a fine of no less than AED 100,000 and no more than AED 1,000,000, or either penalty on its own. Article 50 covers selling or offering counterfeit goods for sale: up to one year in prison and/or a fine of AED 50,000 to AED 200,000. Courts can also order confiscation and destruction of the goods.

That combination, criminal exposure plus confiscation, is what makes the enforcement model different from civil-litigation-led markets. A brand owner doesn’t need to win a multi-year lawsuit to see a seller shut down. A police or Department of Economic Development referral can end in a criminal conviction.

Case one: Ajman’s maximum-penalty ruling

On 31 January 2025, a court in Ajman convicted a defendant of imitating, selling and promoting goods under a protected trademark. The court applied the maximum penalty available under Federal Decree-Law No. 36 of 2021: one year’s imprisonment, an AED 1 million fine, and confiscation of the counterfeit goods.

It’s one of the clearest examples of the criminal track being used at full strength rather than settled down to a fine alone, reported as a deliberate signal from the judiciary that counterfeiting carries real custodial risk, not just a cost of doing business.

Case two: Abu Dhabi Commercial Court halts a trademark impersonator

The second confirmed 2025 action runs through the civil courts instead. The Abu Dhabi Commercial Court ruled that a local retail store had to immediately stop using a globally recognised fashion and e-commerce trademark across its storefront, products, and online and social media presence. The store had used the brand’s name and logo in a way that misled customers into thinking it was affiliated with the original company, which trades exclusively online.

The court ordered the infringing trade name struck from Abu Dhabi’s Department of Economic Development records and from commercial registries across the UAE, and banned the store from using the trademark in any form going forward, including on signage, packaging and social accounts. The ruling was announced on 9 July 2025, and it didn’t stop at first instance: it was upheld on appeal and confirmed by the Court of Cassation, making it final and enforceable UAE-wide.

Two verified, independently reported cases is a smaller list than the five-or-more you’ll find in roundups of India, the US or the UK. That’s the honest count. It reflects a structural difference, not a gap in research: UAE counterfeit enforcement produces convictions and injunctions, but relatively few of them get individually named and reported the way common-law civil suits do.

The numbers behind the headlines

The seizure and inspection data fill in the picture that named cases alone can’t. Dubai Customs reported 68 seizures of counterfeit goods in the first quarter of 2025 alone, worth around Dh42.195 million, spanning watches, eyewear, electronics, clothing, fabrics, bags and shoes.

In Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi Registration Authority (ADRA) reported that the value of counterfeit and non-compliant goods seized across the emirate during 2025 exceeded AED 1.8 million. That figure came out of 465 inspection campaigns targeting commercial establishments and retail outlets, a 16.2% increase on the 400 campaigns run in 2024, and 16,748 inspection visits, more than double 2024’s 6,665, resulting in 104 violations and 294 warnings.

Put together, that’s tens of millions of dirhams in seized counterfeit stock and thousands of inspection visits across just two emirates in a single year, run largely without a matching wave of named court judgments. It’s the clearest evidence that the UAE’s enforcement effort is real and growing, even where it doesn’t produce the kind of case-by-case headlines seen elsewhere.

What this means if you sell into the UAE

For a brand owner, the practical takeaway isn’t that the UAE is soft on counterfeiting. It’s that the enforcement route runs mostly through customs, DED and regulator inspection channels and criminal referral rather than brand-initiated civil suits, so the burden shifts onto having documented proof, test purchases, listing screenshots, seller identifiers, dates, ready to hand a regulator or prosecutor rather than a law firm.

That’s the gap continuous monitoring closes. Truviss’s detect, verify, enforce loop builds that evidence trail automatically across marketplaces and social channels, so when a counterfeit listing or impersonating storefront turns up in the UAE, there’s already a verified record ready to support a customs referral, a DED complaint, or a criminal case, rather than starting from scratch after the fact. The same monitoring principle underpins how brands protect intellectual property in e-commerce more broadly, and it applies just as much to impersonation on social media as it does to storefronts.

Elsewhere on Truviss, a similar enforcement-track piece looks at how US courts are hitting counterfeiters harder under the Seventh Circuit, a useful contrast to the UAE’s criminal and administrative-led approach above.

The UAE’s counterfeit enforcement story in 2025 is two confirmed rulings, a criminal maximum-penalty conviction in Ajman and a civil injunction upheld to the Court of Cassation in Abu Dhabi, sitting on top of a much larger, less visible base of customs seizures and inspection campaigns. For brands selling into the region, that means enforcement is active and improving, but it rewards being monitored and documentation-ready well before a dispute reaches a courtroom.