International Dispute Resolution

[Name of the institute]International Dispute Resolution

Introduction

The debate on the abolition of exequatur is raging. Since the European Council announced that it wanted to suppress intermediate measures in the enforcement of foreign judgments in 19991, the European lawmaker has initiated a process of gradually abolishing exequatur. The first stage of the process was completed between 2003 and 2009 through the adoption of five European regulations which provided for the immediate enforceability of judgments rendered by courts of other Member States of the European Union2. In its draft proposal for amending the Brussels I Regulation of December 20103, the Commission has proposed to continue the process and to generally abolish exequatur in civil and commercial matters, but for a few exceptions.

The project of abolishing exequatur has attracted strong criticism among European scholars4. Critiques have pointed out that exequatur is not a formal procedure, but rather a tool for verifying that the foreign judgment meets some basic requirements. The most important of such requirements is the compatibility of the judgment with the public policy of the enforcing state. The public policy exception allows the enforcing state to deny recognition to foreign judgments violating its most fundamental values. These values include more specifically the human rights recognized by the European Court of Human Rights, as not only the Strasbourg court5 but also the European Court of Justice6 has ruled. Exequatur is therefore a means to ensure that only judgments made in compliance with European human rights law will be enforced throughout the European Union, and to offer a ground for denying recognition when human rights will not have been complied with by the foreign court.

Analyzing Exequatur

Exequatur, is a process of character recognition and synthesis authorization, whose purpose is to introduce in a given order, for respective protection, efficiency, coercivity and execution, one or more statements issued by a competent foreign court or a foreign arbitral tribunal involving the condition of being enforceable. In other words, is the process that foreseen in the Treaties and International Agreements in the Civil Procedure Codes, or the laws of each state in which to be performed, to support judicially enforceable for those pronouncements. These processes correspond to the field of private international law, whose primary function is to address and resolve conflicts that transcend borders of each state. They have meaning and rationale, given the need to provide a solution to disputes arising between subjects of different or equal nationalities, who come or are subject to the authority of a particular court or arbitration, seeking them decide their disputes. It so-called emerging conflicts of laws in the space that houses the aforementioned area of law, which arise because of overlapping of rules diverse content ultimately be applied to decide a particular matter.

There is no doubt that exequatur is a costly procedure. When a creditor wants to enforce a judgment in another Member State of the European Union, he must obtain a declaration of enforceability from the competent authority in that other Member ...