The 5th International Workshop on Exception Handling (WEH.12) is an initiative that aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in order to discuss the multi-faceted research on exception handling from a software engineering perspective. With exception handling increasingly becoming a pervasive issue on real-life projects, it is no longer acceptable to consider exception handling only as an implementation matter. Software developers have being faced a number of software engineering challenges towards the effective specification, design, testing, and evolution of exception handling strategies in existing software projects. In order to discuss contemporary software engineering challenges on exception handling, the WEH workshop is strongly focused on discussions, interleaved with short presentations and discussion groups.