Hague Judgments Convention

The Hague Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Civil or Commercial Matters, adopted on 2 July 2019 under the auspices of the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH), establishes common rules allowing a judgment rendered by a court in one contracting state to be recognised and enforced by courts in other contracting states. It entered into force on 1 September 2023.

The Convention is sometimes called the "2019 Judgments Convention" to distinguish it from the older 1971 Hague Judgments Convention, which attracted only a handful of ratifications. It is also the companion instrument to the 2005 Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements, which deals specifically with exclusive forum-selection clauses.

Key features include:

• A list of "jurisdictional filters" in Article 5 specifying when a foreign judgment qualifies for circulation (e.g., defendant's habitual residence, consent, place of contractual performance).
• Grounds for refusal in Article 7, such as fraud, lack of proper notice, public policy violations, or inconsistency with a judgment between the same parties.
• Exclusions in Article 2 covering family law, wills, insolvency, defamation, intellectual property, antitrust, and arbitration, among others.
• A "bilateralisation" mechanism in Article 29 permitting a state to declare that the Convention shall not apply between it and another specified contracting state.

The European Union approved the Convention in 2022 and it applies to all EU member states except Denmark. Ukraine and Uruguay are also bound. The United Kingdom signed in January 2024 and ratified in June 2025. The United States, China, Israel, Costa Rica, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and the Russian Federation have signed but not ratified.

For practitioners, the Convention reduces the cost and uncertainty of cross-border litigation by replacing patchworks of national rules and bilateral treaties, though its narrow scope means parallel regimes (Brussels I bis, the New York Convention on arbitral awards, the 2005 Choice of Court Convention) remain central.