Convention of 2 July 2019 on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters

The Convention of 2 July 2019 on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters, a treaty concluded within the Hague Conference on Private International Law. See here. It was adopted by consensus of  the member states of the Hague Convention (which has 83 members, 82 countries and the European Union).  has not entered into force yet.  Uruguay  was the first country to sign the new Convention, which is not in force yet; it will enter into force with the second ratification.

This Convention is broader than the  2005 Convention on Choice of Court Agreements, which came into force in 2015 and is currently in force in the EU, Mexico, Singapore, and Montenegro (while it has been signed not yet ratified by Ukraine, China and the US).

The Convention applies to recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil or commercial matters.

The basic principle of the Convention is that a judgment given by a court of a contracting State will be recognized and enforced in another contracting State without reviewing the merits. The recognition will be straightforward when if the judgment complies with one of the jurisdictional filters commonly accepted as bases for jurisdiction (e.g. a defendant’s habitual residence), unless a ground for refusal listed in the  Convention applies (e.g. ordre public).

The first state is called “state of origin” in the language of the Convention while the second is called the requested state (the requested state) without any review of the merits.

Several are the types of judgment excluded from the Convention, most notably family law matters, wills and succession, insolvency, privacy, antitrust, aw enforcement activities

IP judgments (see more exclusions in article 2).

More here and here

Read the text of the Convention here.

For more information, Francesca Giannoni-Crystal