Inheritance across two jurisdictions: whose law governs your Dubai apartment

This is the question nobody asks at the point of purchase and every family asks later. It deserves a plain answer, because the default outcome is frequently not the one buyers assume, and it is fixable at low cost while the owner is alive and expensive to argue about afterwards.

Two separate questions

Which law decides who inherits. Countries answer this differently — some by the deceased's nationality, some by domicile, some by habitual residence, and many treat immovable property separately from everything else, applying the law of the place where the property is.

Which court has jurisdiction and what it will enforce. A foreign will can be recognised, or can require a local process before it does anything, or can be displaced by local mandatory rules.

These are different questions and it is entirely possible to answer the first in your favour and lose on the second.

Why property is the difficult asset

A bank account can often be dealt with under one system. Immovable property tends to attract the law of its location, because that is where the registry is and registries follow their own rules about whose name they will write. So a family can find that a will governs everything except the apartment, which is precisely the asset it was written for.

What can be done in advance

• Establish the default for your specific combination of nationality, residence and asset location. Not the general rule — the one that applies to you.
• Consider a local will for the local asset. In several jurisdictions, including the Emirates, mechanisms exist for a non-Muslim owner to register a will that governs their property here and displaces default rules. Where such a mechanism exists, using it is cheaper and faster than any alternative.
• Check for forced heirship in the systems that could apply. Rules reserving fixed shares to particular relatives override a will's wishes where they apply, and they exist in more countries than people expect.
• Make ownership structure a conscious choice. Joint ownership, company ownership and sole ownership produce different succession outcomes, and the decision is cheapest at purchase.
• Tell somebody where things are. An heir who does not know a property exists, or cannot identify the bank, spends the first year of the process finding out.

The tax layer, separately

Whether an estate is taxed is a different question from who inherits, and it follows its own connecting factors — often domicile or long residence rather than where the asset sits. A country you left years ago may still have a claim on your worldwide estate while having none on your income. That is not a contradiction; it is two different taxes with two different tests.

The practical instruction

Settle this at the time of purchase, in one conversation with someone qualified in both relevant systems, and write down the answer. It is an hour's work and a modest fee against a problem that, unresolved, lands on people who are grieving and unfamiliar with the jurisdiction.