Recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters in the Brussels I Recast, and some lessons from it and the recent Hague Conventions for the Hague Judgments Project

This article looks at the rules on the recognition and enforcement of civil and commercial judgments in the EU and internationally. It provides a detailed description of the procedure for recognition (if requested) and enforcement introduced by the new Brussels I in January 2015 and compares this with the previous procedure. The article then seeks to provide suitable recommendations for the procedure on recognition and enforcement in a future Hague Judgments Convention. In order to inform these recommendations, the article analyses the current procedures in Brussels I, the Hague Choice of Court Convention and the Hague Maintenance Convention 2007. The authors argue that the substantive grounds for non-recognition/enforcement (ie those unrelated to the jurisdictional basis of the original judgment) could be reduced to manifestly contrary to public policy and irreconcilable judgments. It would also be helpful if there were minimum harmonisation of the enforcement procedure so that national and international grounds for non-enforcement could be considered in the same set of proceedings.