Decennial Liability
A statutory liability, in the UAE and other civil-law jurisdictions, under which the contractor and the designer are jointly liable for ten years for total or partial collapse and for defects threatening the building’s stability or safety.
Two features make it unlike ordinary contractual liability. It runs for ten years from handover regardless of what the contract says — it cannot be excluded by agreement — and it is strict: the claimant does not need to prove negligence, only the defect and the damage.
The practical consequence is a records one, and it is routinely missed. A claim can arrive nine years after handover, long after the project team has dispersed and the mailboxes have been deactivated. Whether you can defend it depends entirely on whether somebody, at the time, decided to retain the photographs, the test results and the as-builts for a decade — and that decision is made once, deliberately, or it is made by an IT clear-down.