A judgment or an award obtained after years of proceedings is worth, in practice, only what its prospect of enforcement is worth. Three competing regimes govern the circulation of foreign decisions in France today: the ordinary law, European law and arbitration law, each with its own conditions, its own court and its own time limits. An initial mistake of characterisation is rarely recoverable, and the reform of French arbitration law entering into force on 1 January 2027, made by Decree No 2026-741 of 6 August 2026, redeals some of the cards. Six points determine, concretely, whether a foreign title will be enforceable in France.
1. Recognition and enforcement are not the same thing
The whole subject of exequatur lies in the gap between the validity of a title and its territorial effectiveness. A valid judgment may remain a dead letter. A foreign decision is recognised as producing effects of increasing intensity: evidential effect makes it a mere item of proof, res judicata prevents relitigating what it decided, and only enforceability allows a judicial officer to levy execution. A foreign judgment on the status or capacity of persons therefore produces effect in France without exequatur, as the case law has accepted since Bulkley of 28 February 1860, and exequatur becomes necessary again only for material enforcement against property or constraint against persons (Req., 3 March 1930, Hainard).
Bringing an unnecessary application exposes the claimant to inadmissibility; wrongly dispensing with one exposes the seizure to annulment. The Decree of 6 August 2026 extends that distinction to arbitration law, creating a free-standing action for recognition which confers on the award the authority of res judicata without enforceability. Choosing which of the two is needed is therefore the first decision in any file, and it is made before anything is filed.
2. Within the European Union, exequatur has disappeared, with exceptions
Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012, Brussels I bis, enshrines a logic of mutual trust: recognition is automatic (Article 36) and exequatur abolished (Article 39). The creditor produces the decision and the Article 53 certificate directly to the judicial officer, without any prior application to a French court; it is for the debtor to apply to the court for refusal, on one of the five grounds exhaustively listed in Article 45, of which Article 45(3) expressly excludes any review of the jurisdiction of the court of origin, Article 52 prohibiting in any event a review as to substance.
The Brussels II ter Regulation generalises that model in matrimonial matters and parental responsibility, as does the Lugano Convention, which binds the Union to Switzerland, Norway and Iceland and has never been aligned on Brussels I bis. The practical point is that a creditor holding a judgment from a Member State who instructs a French lawyer to obtain exequatur is asking for a procedure that no longer exists, and losing months doing so.
3. Outside the Union, only three conditions since Cornelissen
Under the ordinary law, founded on Article 509 of the Code of Civil Procedure alone, the Cornelissen judgment of 20 February 2007 reduced the French court’s review to three conditions: the indirect jurisdiction of the foreign court, assessed since the Simitch judgment of 6 February 1985 by reference to a characterised connection with the dispute and the absence of a fraudulent choice of forum; conformity with international public policy, substantive and procedural; and the absence of evasion of the law. The exequatur judge no longer has to verify that the law applied by the foreign court is the one designated by the French conflict rule: the review has moved from the method to the result. The judge looks at where one arrives, not at how one got there.
The procedure lies with the judicial court sitting as a single judge, with mandatory representation by an avocat and an adversarial hearing. The full court judgment of 3 July 2026, given in a surrogacy case, further established exequatur as an autonomous route to recognition, distinct from transcription and from adoption, the most important ordinary law decision since Cornelissen.
4. The French regime for arbitral awards is the most liberal there is
The most widely ratified instrument of international trade law, with one hundred and seventy-two States parties, the New York Convention of 1958 sets a light burden of proof and reserves, in its Article VII(1), the right to rely on a more favourable national regime. It is that more-favourable-right clause which allows a French court to prefer its own law: since the Putrabali judgment of 29 June 2007, the Court of Cassation holds that an international award is attached to no national legal order, so that its annulment by the court of the seat has no effect in France.
Article 1514 of the Code of Civil Procedure lays down only a double condition: the existence of the award and the absence of manifest contrariety to international public policy. Exequatur is granted by order on application, a non-adversarial procedure, and Article 1526 makes the appeal non-suspensive: the debtor must perform first and argue afterwards. Enforcement does not wait for the appeal. Since 1 June 2025, those appeals fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the international commercial chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, established by Law No 2024-537 of 13 June 2024.
5. But the review of corruption and money laundering has tightened
The doctrine of minimal review, long confined to a flagrant, effective and concrete violation of public policy (the Thalès and then SNF v Cytec judgments), has given way to a thorough examination in corruption cases, begun by the Paris Court of Appeal in Belokon (2017) and then Alstom v Alexander Brothers (2018, the red flags method). The Belokon judgment of 23 March 2022 confirmed that shift in the Court of Cassation: the review by the annulment court is not limited to the evidence produced before the arbitrators, nor bound by their findings. The Sorelec judgment of 7 September 2022 holds that the ground is admissible even if it was not raised before the arbitral tribunal, an exception to the waiver principle of Article 1466 of the Code of Civil Procedure.
The most recent case law nevertheless marks a rebalancing: the Gabon v Averda judgment of 28 October 2025 rejects an allegation of corruption in a review described as precision surgery, recalling that a thorough examination is not a systematic suspicion. The judge verifies; he does not retry the case. For a party defending an award, the practical consequence is that the evidence of the underlying transaction must be capable of being produced at the enforcement stage, years after the arbitration ended.
6. The real question is not how but where: State immunity from execution
Obtaining exequatur is not obtaining payment, and this is where creditors, even holding a perfectly regular title, most often fail. Against a State debtor, Article 59 of the Sapin II Law of 9 December 2016 makes any measure of enforcement against the property of a foreign State subject to prior authorisation by a judge (Article L. 111-1-1 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures), save express consent of the State or property allocated to a commercial activity. The Commisimpex saga illustrates the difficulty: a judgment of 13 April 2023 relaxed the requirement of express and specific waiver outside the diplomatic sphere, after several reversals since 2015.
In investment matters, the Washington Convention of 1965 establishes on the contrary an autonomous regime with no public policy review (Articles 53 and 54), subject however to the Achmea judgment, which has excluded intra-European investor-State arbitration since 2018. Before any action, the decisive question therefore remains the location of the debtor’s assets, not merely the obtaining of a title. A title with no asset to seize is worth nothing.
On the same subject, for a country without any treaty with France but with two legal traditions: enforcing a Canadian or Quebec judgment in France.
Do you hold a foreign judgment or an arbitral award and need to know whether it can be enforced in France, and against what? The firm assesses the regime, the route and the assets.
Further reading: enforcing a US or English judgment in France, exequatur of an arbitral award in France, recovering an unpaid invoice from a foreign customer, governing law and jurisdiction clauses.
Written by Hervé Guyader, avocat at the Paris Bar, doctor of law. This content is general information and is no substitute for advice on your own matter.