Hague Judgments Convention: disadvantages and the EU position

As we talked in our last post, the Hague Judgments Convention (“Convention”), will enter into force at the international level in September 2023. Recapping, the Hague Judgements is an international convention that will unify the procedure of the recognition and enforcement of foreigner court judgements between contracting states. In other words, the convention provides enforcement to a court judgement rendered in one state to another without reviewing the merits of that judgement.

Despite all the good aspects, that we have already mentioned in our last post, you may ask us about its disadvantages. Well, probably the biggest problem of the convention is its application. It only applies to civil and commercial judgments, and does not apply to criminal, tax, customs or administrative matters. Certain civil and commercial matters are also excluded, including family law, insolvency, privacy, intellectual property, certain antitrust matters, arbitration and related proceedings and interim measures.

The same way, it applies only to the recognition and enforcement of decrees, but does not address the jurisdiction of a court to hear a dispute through to the enforcement stage, increasing the risk of parallel proceedings in different jurisdictions.

Nevertheless, the contracting states can also exclude the applying of the Convention in some topics (public policy as an example). For instance, the European Union (“EU”) has declared that it will not apply the Convention to non-residential leases of immovable property in the EU, arguing that they have “a strong interest” in this matter.

And because of that, behind the advantages and the positive side of the Convention, in actual practice, unfortunately, it might be less used than it could be, due to the position of some states that may refuse its application in some topics, reducing its effects, and consequently also reducing the globalization of the Convention.