When claiming your rights becomes a full-time job

The email arrived with the flat courtesy of all such messages. “Dear Customer,” it began, before announcing a change to the monthly Fall-Below Fee — the charge a bank applies when your balance slips beneath a required minimum — taking effect this September.

Unremarkable, until it jogged loose something I had almost forgotten: I still hold accounts with this bank that I have not touched in nearly two years.

So I tried to close one. The system refused. Charges had accrued, it said; settle them first, and only then may you leave.

I called customer service. How, I asked, can an account I have not used in two years still be alive — still quietly charging me? The reply was patient and, in its way, unanswerable. I must have received a communication I had missed. Keep a product, use it or not, and the fee applies.

There it is: the small, sinking moment familiar to anyone who has ever signed a contract they did not fully read. You wonder what else lives in the fine print. You reach for a document you skimmed years ago and find nothing — only the suspicion that the terms were always clear, and that it was you who looked away.

But here is what struck me most, once the irritation passed. To find out whether I was being treated fairly, I could not simply ask and be answered. I had to investigate. And what that investigation demanded, when I looked at it honestly, was the work of preparing a legal case.

To contest a single fee, I had to locate the Central Bank’s Consumer Protection Standards, read them, and find the clause requiring a bank to give at least 60 days’ written notice before a fee changes. I had to learn that I was entitled to a closing statement within days of asking to shut the account. I had to dig out terms I had agreed to years earlier, match them against the charge, and assemble it all into an argument I could put back to the bank with some confidence. Research. Evidence. Knowledge of the rules. The composure to argue them. That is not customer service. That is litigation — conducted by an amateur, against an institution with a legal department, over a fee smaller than a week’s groceries.

When my husband overheard me arguing on the phone, he asked how much it was. A hundred and fifty dirhams, I said. “Just pay it and close the account,” he replied — “why put yourself through this?” He was voicing the calculation many people make. But that is precisely how the arithmetic works. How many other customers, quoted the same modest figure, will reach the same sensible conclusion? How many quiet Dh150 charges, multiplied across thousands of customers who decide the fight is not worth an afternoon, simply remain unchallenged because the cost of questioning them exceeds the amount at stake?

And I, at least, could have argued on. I read English comfortably, I had the hours to spare, and enough familiarity with rules and regulators to suspect such protections might even exist. But a right that can only be claimed by those able to research, read and argue their way to it is not truly a universal right. It is a privilege dressed as one. Think of who else received that same email — the worker whose English is functional but not fluent, the person on a modest wage for whom an afternoon on hold is an afternoon’s earnings lost, the customer who has never heard of a Consumer Protection Standard and would never imagine that a regulator sits above the bank, ready to listen. For them, the fee is not a puzzle to be solved. It is simply money gone.

And banking merely exposed the problem; it did not create it. The same imbalance runs through telecom contracts, insurance policies, streaming subscriptions, digital platforms, even employment benefits — pages of terms you cannot negotiate, only accept or decline in full. Modern commerce increasingly assumes that every consumer has the time, confidence and legal literacy to police the contracts they sign. Most of us have none of the three.

None of this means the system is lawless. The UAE’s framework is, in fact, more protective than many realise — the 60-day notice rule, the right to plain disclosure of what a product costs, the right to a swift closing statement, the right to escalate a complaint to the Central Bank itself. The protections are real. What is missing is not the rule but its reach: the assurance that an ordinary person, without a lawyer’s patience, can actually find and use them.

I will settle the charges and close the account. It cost me an afternoon and a small measure of pride. But I keep thinking about the reader who received that same email, felt the same unease, and simply paid — not out of carelessness, but because no one had ever handed them the map, the language, or the time to fight for a few dirhams they were owed.

Information has become the currency of modern consumer protection. Those who know the rules often keep their money; those who do not quietly lose it.

Consumer protection is not measured by the rights written into law. It is measured by the rights ordinary people can actually exercise. When understanding those rights requires the patience of a lawyer and the research habits of a regulator, the law may be equal — but access to it is not.

Asma Jan Muhammad is a chartered accountant and author based in Dubai