Enforcing Foreign Judgments: Paper Needs a Passport

You already won. The court agreed with you, the judgment has a seal on it, and your lawyer sent congratulations. The debtor has not paid, because a judgment is not money. A judgment is a hunting license — valid only in the jurisdiction that issued it. Carry it across a border and it becomes a well-argued opinion.

This is the part of debt recovery nobody explains until the invoice for it arrives. This briefing follows one judgment across three borders, each with its own rulebook.

Border one: Belgium, in weeks

Inside the EU, the hunting license travels almost by itself. Under the Brussels I recast regulation, a judgment from one member state is enforceable in every other with no local re-trial and no exequatur ceremony — that ceremony was abolished in 2015, a fact a surprising number of creditors have not yet received. The Dutch group obtained the standard certificate from the Rotterdam court, added a translation, and handed the package to a Belgian huissier. The debtor's Belgian receivables were attached within weeks.

For EU-to-EU claims, the practical lesson is blunt: enforcement across the border is now closer to logistics than litigation. Delay, not doctrine, is the only thing creditors lose to.

Border two: London, after Brexit

The UK leg used to be equally simple; Brexit removed Brussels I from the picture and left a gap that ran for several years. The gap is closing: the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention entered into force for the United Kingdom in July 2025, restoring a treaty route between the UK and the EU for judgments from proceedings started since then. Older judgments travel the common-law road instead — a fresh English action on the judgment, typically resolved by summary judgment, slower than a certificate but far from a re-trial.

The Dutch group's Rotterdam proceedings predated the Convention, so counsel took the common-law route against the warehouse company. The debtor, invited to explain to an English judge why a reasoned Dutch judgment should be ignored, produced no explanation. The map of treaties that governs which route applies where is exactly what our treaties reference exists to track.

Border three: Dubai, the hard mile

Then there are the jurisdictions where the license barely travels. The UAE enforces foreign judgments through a mesh of bilateral treaties, regional conventions and reciprocity provisions — and the Netherlands holds no general judgments treaty with it. The same pattern governs much of the Gulf: as we detailed for Kuwait, a European judgment can arrive in the region with the legal force of high-quality stationery.

Field note: debtors defend borders, not principles. Every jurisdiction where your judgment bites makes the remaining ones cheaper.

Which is precisely how the Dubai leg ended. With Belgian receivables attached and English proceedings advancing, the holding company proposed settlement of the full remaining balance — resolved without a single filing in the UAE. Creditors who map the easy enforcement theaters first routinely find the hard ones surrender by phone.

The award exception

One instrument outruns every judgment: the arbitral award. Under the New York Convention — ratified by some 170 states, including nearly every jurisdiction in this article's hard category — a foreign arbitration award enforces through streamlined local confirmation, with narrow defenses. The judgment map is a patchwork; the award map is nearly the globe.

The contract-drafting consequence writes itself. If your counterparties sit in reciprocity jurisdictions — the Gulf, much of Asia, anywhere your judgment would become stationery — an arbitration clause is the cheapest enforcement insurance available. It costs a paragraph.

Sue where the money sleeps

The deepest lesson of file XJ-0088 came before any of it: asset mapping preceded strategy. The Dutch group did not simply sue at home because home was comfortable — it confirmed, first, where the debtor kept attachable value, then chose forums whose output could reach it. Creditors who win judgments in the wrong jurisdiction have purchased an expensive document and a lesson.

Before litigating any cross-border claim, three questions in order: where are the assets, which regimes connect your possible forums to those assets, and does the contract's jurisdiction or arbitration clause already answer both. Our legal escalation team runs this assessment at intake, because the moment to think about enforcement is before the claim is filed, not after the champagne.

One more instrument belongs in the mapping conversation: freezing the assets before the debtor moves them. Inside the EU, the European Account Preservation Order lets a creditor freeze a debtor's bank accounts across member states — obtainable without warning the debtor, before or during proceedings, precisely so the judgment has something left to bite. England offers its own famously muscular version, the worldwide freezing injunction. A judgment against an emptied account is stationery of a different kind; creditors facing a debtor with fast fingers should raise preservation on day one, not after the wire transfers.

The field manual

The XJ-0088 sequence, generalized:

A judgment is the middle of the story, not the end. The creditors who get paid are the ones who read the last chapter first.