An ICC award rendered in Paris in March 2026 orders a Turkish buyer to pay 2.8 million euros. The creditor holds a title recognised in more than one hundred and seventy States, and holds nothing at all until it has taken the step that makes the award enforceable. Three months later the useful bank accounts have been emptied and the debtor subsidiary has ceased trading. The award was good, the enforcement timetable was not.
This page deals with what happens after the award: enforcement in France and what it actually adds, the limited review the French judge carries out, the five grounds for setting aside, the absence of suspensive effect, contractual waiver of the action to set aside, enforcement abroad under the New York Convention, and the reform of 6 August 2026 that takes effect on 1 January 2027.
1. What an enforcement order adds to an already binding award
An arbitral award has res judicata effect as soon as it is made. It binds the parties, but it does not allow a bank account to be attached or any measure of forced execution to be taken. For that an enforceable title is needed, and that is what the enforcement order confers. The code of civil procedure is explicit: an arbitral award may be enforced only by virtue of an enforcement order (article 1516).
The review carried out at that stage is deliberately narrow. Under article 1514, arbitral awards are recognised or enforced in France if the party relying on them establishes their existence and if such recognition or enforcement is not manifestly contrary to international public policy. Two conditions, therefore, and only two: proof of the existence of the award, and the absence of manifest contrariety to international public policy. The enforcement judge does not rehear the dispute, does not check the tribunal’s reasoning and does not review its application of the law.
That economy of review is the foundation of French attractiveness in international arbitration. It has a counterpart that companies underestimate: an unfavourable award is almost as hard to neutralise as a favourable one is easy to have recognised. The moment to weigh the risks is not when the award is notified, but when the clause is drafted and the case is run.
2. Which court, and under what procedure
Jurisdiction is determined by the place where the award was made. The enforcement order is issued by the judicial court in whose district the award was made, or by the judicial court of Paris where it was made abroad (article 1516). For an ICC award made in Geneva, London or Singapore and intended to be enforced in France, it is therefore the judicial court of Paris that is seised, wherever the debtor’s assets are located in the territory.
The procedure on an application for enforcement is not adversarial. The debtor is neither summoned nor heard, and discovers the order when it is served or when an enforcement measure is taken. That one sided character is a considerable advantage for a diligent creditor, and the reason why the order of operations matters more than the speed of any one of them taken alone.
The application is filed at the registry by the more diligent party, together with a copy of the award and of the arbitration agreement satisfying the conditions required for their authenticity. Where the award is not drafted in French, the enforcement order is also affixed to the translation. These formal requirements look secondary; in practice they are the leading cause of rejection, and satisfying them is prepared during the arbitration, not afterwards.
3. The five grounds for setting aside
An action to set aside an award made in France in international arbitration is open only in five cases, listed in article 1520: the tribunal wrongly upheld or declined jurisdiction; the tribunal was irregularly constituted; the tribunal ruled without complying with the mission conferred on it; due process was not respected; recognition or enforcement of the award is contrary to international public policy.
The list is exhaustive, and the wording of the text, the action is open only if, conveys its spirit. None of these grounds permits the merits to be reargued. An error in interpreting the contract, a generous assessment of loss, a reading of the applicable law thought to be wrong: none of that opens the action. That is the structural difference with an appeal against a judgment, and the reason why the success rate of actions to set aside remains low before the Paris Court of Appeal.
The grounds that actually succeed are those going to the regularity of the arbitral process rather than its result. Jurisdiction upheld on a clause that did not bind the party targeted, an arbitrator whose undisclosed connection emerges after the award, a head of claim decided although it had not been put to the tribunal, a decisive document excluded from adversarial debate. All are grounds built during the proceedings, through objections raised in good time, and lost where they were not raised before the tribunal itself.
Contrariety to international public policy deserves separate mention, because it is the most invoked and among the least understood. It does not cover the whole body of French mandatory rules. It targets a core of principles whose violation would offend the French conception of public policy in the international order: corruption, money laundering, fraud, breach of an international sanction, serious infringement of the rights of the defence. The precise boundary is where most post award litigation before the Paris Court of Appeal is fought, and it is assessed case by case.
4. The action does not suspend enforcement
This is the point legal departments most often discover too late. An action to set aside the award and an appeal against the order granting enforcement have no suspensive effect (article 1526). The party ordered to pay that seises the Paris Court of Appeal has frozen nothing: the creditor may pursue enforcement throughout the action, which lasts months, sometimes longer.
The text provides a safety valve. The First President sitting in summary proceedings or, once seised, the pre trial judge, may stay or adjust enforcement of the award where enforcement is liable seriously to prejudice the rights of one of the parties. The test is demanding. It is not enough to argue that payment would be heavy, nor that restitution would be awkward if the award were set aside; serious prejudice must be established, which requires concrete evidence on financial position and on the irreversible nature of the harm.
The practical consequence is an asymmetry of tempo between the two camps. The creditor has every interest in enforcing quickly, before the debtor organises its insolvency or obtains an adjustment. A debtor that seriously intends to resist must prepare its application to stay enforcement at the same time as its action, not after receiving the first demand. A few days often separate those two strategies.
5. Waiving the action to set aside, and what survives it
The parties may, by specific agreement, expressly waive the action to set aside at any time (article 1522). The waiver is available only in international arbitration, and it appeals to drafters attached to speed, since it removes the route by which a loser can delay the outcome by two or three years.
It does not however close off all challenge. The same article states that parties who have waived may still appeal against the enforcement order, on one of the grounds set out in article 1520, within one month of notification of the award bearing the enforcement order, notification being effected by service unless the parties agree otherwise. The same complaints may therefore be made, through another door and within a shorter period.
The calculation is therefore not the one usually assumed. Waiving the action to set aside does not eliminate post award litigation; it moves it to the appeal against enforcement and compresses it in time. A waiver clause is weighed against the seat chosen, the location of the assets and the likely identity of the loser, which calls for analysis of the contract rather than a general preference.
6. Enforcing outside France, under the 1958 New York Convention
The real strength of an arbitral award owes less to the law of the seat than to the treaty network that carries it. The Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, done at New York on 10 June 1958, today binds 172 States according to the status of ratifications maintained by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. No national judgment travels so widely, and that is the first objective reason to prefer arbitration to a commercial court in an international contract.
The mechanism rests on a reversal of the burden. The party seeking enforcement produces the award and the arbitration agreement; it is for the party opposing it to establish one of the grounds for refusal exhaustively listed in article V, to which are added the two grounds the court may raise of its own motion, non arbitrability of the dispute and contrariety to the public policy of the requested country. The list largely overlaps that of article 1520 of the code of civil procedure without being identical to it, and that difference of a few words is sometimes enough to make two decisions on the same award diverge in two States.
One point should be understood before choosing a seat. Setting aside by the court of the seat is among the grounds for refusal in article V, but French law has long accepted that an award set aside abroad may nonetheless be recognised in France, because an international award is not attached to any national legal order. Not every jurisdiction reasons that way. The choice of seat therefore commits far more than the geography of hearings: it determines which court may set the award aside, and what weight that annulment will carry elsewhere.
Timing matters as much as law. Limitation periods for enforcement, translation and legalisation formalities, and local attachment rules vary from State to State, and the order in which parallel proceedings are commenced affects their outcome. It is a mapping exercise on the debtor’s assets, to be conducted before the award rather than after, and settled case by case.
7. What changes on 1 January 2027
Decree no. 2026-741 of 6 August 2026, containing various measures to clarify and modernise arbitral procedure, takes effect on 1 January 2027. In international matters it amends articles 1504, 1505, 1515, 1516, 1517, 1521, 1523, 1524, 1525, 1526 and 1527 of the code of civil procedure, and creates articles 1516-1 and 1527-1 to 1527-5. Its application is modulated by article 22: for everything concerning the award, its recognition, its enforcement and the available remedies, the new text applies to awards made after 1 January 2027. An ICC award made in December 2026 therefore remains governed by current law, including for an action brought in 2027.
The first innovation is a free standing recognition procedure. New article 1516-1 allows an award to be recognised by order of the judicial court of the place where it was made, or of the judicial court of Paris if it was made abroad, or incidentally, on the same terms as enforcement. Recognition and forced execution cease to be conflated. The distinction is useful where the aim is not to attach assets but to rely on res judicata in other proceedings, which is frequent where parallel proceedings exist.
The second concerns the stay of enforcement, and it favours the creditor. New article 1526 maintains the absence of suspensive effect, extends it expressly to an appeal against the order granting enforcement or recognition, and above all changes the judge’s power: where the current text allows enforcement to be stayed or adjusted, the new text allows only suspension, by an order not open to challenge. The power of adjustment disappears, that is to say the possibility of letting enforcement continue subject to conditions such as a deposit. For a debtor that contests, the middle position vanishes: it will be suspension or nothing.
The remedies regime is also rewritten. New article 1523 opens an appeal against a decision refusing recognition or enforcement of an international award made in France, within one month of notification. New article 1525 maintains the appeal against a decision on an award made abroad, within one month of service, now allowing the parties to agree another method of notification. And new article 1527 provides that dismissal on the merits of the appeal or of the action to set aside confers enforcement on the award or, where it cannot be enforced, its recognition.
8. Set aside proceedings before the Court of Appeal, new version
Articles 1527-1 to 1527-5, created by the same decree, give international post award litigation its own procedural regime before the Court of Appeal. An appeal against the order ruling on enforcement and an action to set aside are now brought, prepared and decided under the contentious procedure rules of articles 900 to 930-1, subject to the particular provisions of the section (article 1527-1). The anchoring is clarified, which ends a series of uncertainties about the applicable steps.
The next three provisions draw the consequences of the international character of these disputes. Parties may put documents in a foreign language into the record without translation, the pre trial judge retaining power to order one (article 1527-3). That judge may authorise the parties, witnesses and technical experts, as well as counsel, to speak in a foreign language, with an interpreter if needed (article 1527-4). Finally, the hearing may be held in chambers rather than in public (article 1527-5), recognising that the confidentiality of an arbitration should not be destroyed by the challenge brought against it.
For a company, those three rules translate into savings of time and money that are not symbolic. Certified translation of an international arbitration file routinely costs tens of thousands of euros and takes several weeks. Above all they signal a direction: Paris intends to treat post award challenges as international litigation, not as an ordinary appeal with exceptions bolted on.
Frequently asked questions
How long does enforcement of an ICC award take in France
As the procedure is not adversarial, the order is generally obtained within a few weeks, the timing depending mainly on the workload of the court seised and the quality of the file submitted. Delays rarely come from the judge: they come from the documents, from the authenticity of the copy of the award and of the arbitration agreement, and from translation where the award is not in French. These elements are prepared during the arbitration, and a complete file at first filing saves more time than any later chasing.
Can the debtor block enforcement by bringing an action to set aside
No, not by the action alone. Article 1526 of the code of civil procedure excludes any suspensive effect, so the creditor may pursue enforcement while the case is before the Paris Court of Appeal. The debtor must separately apply to the First President in summary proceedings, or to the pre trial judge, and show that enforcement is liable seriously to prejudice its rights. For awards made on or after 1 January 2027, that judge will be able to suspend enforcement but no longer to adjust it.
Can an award set aside at the seat still be enforced in France
French law accepts that it can, because it does not attach an international award to the legal order of the seat. An award set aside by the court of the seat may therefore in principle be granted enforcement in France if the conditions of articles 1514 and 1520 are met. That solution is not universal, and the outcome depends on the jurisdiction in which enforcement is sought. Where the debtor’s assets are scattered, the question is settled State by State, on local case law.
What should be done in the month after an unfavourable award is notified
Two things in parallel, and fast. Check whether one of the five grounds in article 1520 is seriously arguable, which means re-reading the proceedings and not just the award, since most of those grounds require objections raised in good time. And measure exposure to immediate enforcement, by locating attachable assets and assessing whether an application to suspend has any prospect. One month is short when the award runs to two hundred pages.
Does a waiver of the action to set aside in our clause leave us without remedy
No. Article 1522 of the code of civil procedure expressly preserves the appeal against the enforcement order, on one of the grounds set out in article 1520, within one month of notification of the award bearing the enforcement order. The complaints remain available, but the window is narrower and the timetable is driven by the creditor’s initiative. A waiver clause changes the defence strategy; it does not remove it.