A foreign judgment is not recovered in France through exequatur proceedings alone, but by seizing assets identified in advance. The method has three stages: map the debtor’s assets, freeze them with protective measures that do not wait for exequatur, then obtain an enforceable title and convert. For a judgment given in the European Union, there is no exequatur to apply for at all.
In March 2026 the Supreme Court of the State of New York orders a Lebanese investor based in Dubai to pay 6.8 million dollars to an American fund that had lent him money. The debtor has nothing left in New York. In France, he holds an apartment in the 16th arrondissement of Paris through a société civile, a minority stake in a logistics company in Lyon, an account with a private bank in the 8th arrondissement and, every summer, a thirty-metre yacht moored in Antibes. The fund’s general counsel does not ask how exequatur works. He asks how much he will recover, from which assets, and how long it will take.
He is right. Exequatur is only one segment of the answer, and rarely the first. This page follows the order in which a recovery file is actually built: finding the assets, identifying the regime that governs the judgment, freezing before holding a title, obtaining the title, seizing and selling, countering the debtor’s manoeuvres, dealing separately with arbitral awards, and settling on a strategy when the stakes justify the costs. Each technical step links to a detailed analysis published on this site; this page sets out how they fit together.
1. Start with an asset map, not a writ
A foreign judgment is worth, in France, only what it allows the creditor to reach. The first day of a file is therefore not spent drafting a writ, but listing what the debtor owns, in what form and in whose hands. A creditor who reverses that order spends months and fees obtaining an enforceable title that will find nothing to seize, or will find assets sold in the meantime.
Real property held in the debtor’s own name is traced through the land register: the état hypothécaire issued by the land registry (service de la publicité foncière) gives the owner, the date and price of acquisition, the registered mortgages and their ranking, and any seizure orders already published by other creditors. Shareholdings appear in the trade and companies register, whose filed documents (articles, transfers, minutes) show who holds what, while the filed annual accounts give an idea of the value of the companies concerned. The register of beneficial owners, which links a company to the individual who controls it, has not been open to the public since the Court of Justice struck down general access to that information (CJEU, Grand Chamber, 22 November 2022, WM and Sovim, joined cases C-37/20 and C-601/20). Access is now reserved to public authorities, to professionals subject to anti-money-laundering duties and to persons with a legitimate interest within the meaning of Directive (EU) 2024/1640, a notion designed for the fight against money laundering, not for debt recovery. A creditor as such is not among those entitled: the search should not be built on that register.
Bank accounts raise a particular difficulty. The creditor almost never knows where the debtor banks, and no public database will tell him. The national register of bank accounts kept by the tax authorities is open only to the commissaire de justice (the French enforcement officer), and only when acting under an enforceable title or a court order authorising a protective attachment of bank accounts (Articles L. 152-1 and L. 152-2 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures). The same provision gives him access to information held by public bodies on the debtor’s employer, his other debtors and the composition of his real estate holdings. The foreign judgment alone does not open that door. An order of the juge de l’exécution (the enforcement judge) does, which is one reason to apply for it early.
Then come the claims that third parties owe the debtor, often overlooked although they are the easiest to reach: rents paid by the tenants of a building, invoices owed by French customers, dividends declared but not yet paid, sale proceeds held by a notary, a shareholder’s current account. And valuable movable property, first among them pleasure vessels, whose presence in a French port is seasonal and whose arrest follows its own rules, described in our analysis of arresting a ship on the strength of a foreign judgment.
In the New York example, the map changes everything. The apartment belongs not to the debtor but to his société civile, so a seizure of the property itself is closed and the route runs through the shares, slower and less rewarding, while the Paris account, whose balance and even exact bank are still unknown, is probably the only cash that can be attached immediately, and the Lyon stake, a minority holding with no market, will serve more to put pressure on the debtor than to pay the debt. That leaves the yacht. It will leave Antibes in October.
2. The country of the judgment sets the timetable
Before taking any step, the creditor must know which regime governs the judgment, because the gap between regimes is measured in months. There are four situations, and the first is the one most creditors overlook.
A judgment given in a Member State of the European Union needs no exequatur. Article 39 of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012, known as Brussels I bis, makes it enforceable in all other Member States without any declaration of enforceability. A German, Italian or Dutch creditor produces the judgment and the certificate under Article 53, issued by the court of origin, and can have a seizure carried out in France. Article 43 only requires the certificate to be served on the debtor before the first enforcement measure, a requirement that does not apply to protective measures, and Article 40 provides that an enforceable judgment carries by operation of law the power to take them. The debtor can react only afterwards, by applying to the enforcement judge for refusal of enforcement on one of the grounds exhaustively listed in Article 45. The regime is set out in detail in our analysis of enforcing a German judgment in France, which applies to all European judgments.
Swiss, Norwegian and Icelandic judgments fall under the Lugano Convention of 30 October 2007, which keeps a declaration of enforceability, but one issued on application by the chief clerk of the tribunal judiciaire (Article 509-2 of the Code of Civil Procedure), without hearing the debtor and within a few weeks. This intermediate regime is described in our analysis of Swiss judgments.
The Hague Convention of 2 July 2019 on the recognition and enforcement of judgments binds the European Union since 1 September 2023 and the United Kingdom since 1 July 2025, among others. It frames the grounds for refusal without removing the need to go before the French court, and its Article 16 limits it to proceedings instituted in the State of origin at a time when the Convention already had effect between that State and the requested State. An English judgment given in 2026 in proceedings started in 2024 is therefore outside it and follows the ordinary law. The date of the claim form is the first document to request from English counsel.
Everything else falls under the ordinary French law of exequatur, unless a bilateral treaty applies: American, Canadian and Singaporean judgments, English judgments that predate the Convention, and those of the many States with which France has signed nothing. The bilateral treaties concluded with the United Arab Emirates, China, Morocco, Tunisia or Algeria adjust the procedure without removing it, and sometimes impose conditions that the ordinary law has abandoned. Each has its own page: American and English judgments, Canadian and Quebec judgments, UAE judgments, Chinese, Singaporean, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian and OHADA judgments.
3. Freeze the assets without waiting for the title
Should the creditor wait for exequatur before acting? No, and the creditor who waits makes the most expensive mistake in the field. Article L. 511-1 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures allows anyone whose claim appears well founded in principle to ask the court for leave to take a protective measure, provided he shows circumstances likely to threaten recovery. No enforceable title is required. A foreign judgment, even one not yet recognised, goes a long way to establish that the claim is well founded in principle; a debtor domiciled outside France whose only known assets are in France often establishes the threat on his own.
The application is decided without a hearing and without notice to the debtor. A protective attachment of bank accounts, of sale proceeds held by a notary or of rents, a provisional judicial mortgage on a building, a judicial pledge over the shares of the société civile that owns the apartment: all of this can be done within days, often before the debtor has understood that French proceedings have begun. In return, the creditor must start proceedings to obtain an enforceable title within one month, failing which the measure lapses (Article R. 511-7), which for an ordinary-law judgment means serving the writ for exequatur. That writ must therefore be ready before the application is even filed.
Whether the foreign judgment dispenses the creditor from seeking the judge’s leave, and which measure suits which asset, are discussed in detail in our analysis of securing assets before exequatur. What matters here fits in one sentence. The protective measure is not a preliminary step in the procedure: it is its lever. A debtor whose accounts are frozen, whose building can no longer be sold free of charges and whose shares are pledged will negotiate, because waiting costs him more than it costs the creditor.
4. Obtain the enforceable title
For an ordinary-law judgment, the title is obtained by a writ before the tribunal judiciaire, with mandatory representation by a lawyer, in adversarial proceedings. The French court does not retry the case. Since the Cornelissen judgment, outside any international convention, it checks that three conditions are met: the indirect jurisdiction of the foreign court, based on the connection between the dispute and the court seised, compliance with substantive and procedural international public policy, and the absence of fraud on the law (Cass. 1re civ., 20 February 2007, No. 05-14.082). Review of the merits is excluded, and review of the law applied has gone.
The file is prepared before the writ, and this is where months are won or lost. It needs a certified copy of the judgment, proof that it is enforceable in its country of origin (a certificate of finality or its local equivalent), proof of service of the document instituting proceedings where the defendant did not appear, and translations by a sworn translator. An American default judgment with no trace of service of the summons in the forms of the Hague Convention of 15 November 1965 hands the debtor the ground most often upheld against foreign judgments: breach of the rights of the defence.
Allow six to eight months where there is no serious challenge, twelve to eighteen where the debtor fights, longer on appeal. Article L. 111-3 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures lists among enforceable titles foreign judgments declared enforceable by a decision not subject to an appeal with suspensive effect. The creditor therefore has every interest in obtaining an exequatur judgment with provisional enforcement, which allows him to convert his attachments without waiting for the appeal ruling. The defences available to the debtor, and their real weight, are set out in our analysis of challenging exequatur.
In the New York file, one point deserves attention from the outset. If the award includes punitive damages, the Cour de cassation accepts them in principle but holds that an amount disproportionate to the loss suffered and to the debtor’s contractual breaches is contrary to public policy; in the case it decided, exequatur of the whole judgment was refused (Cass. 1re civ., 1 December 2010, No. 09-13.303). A fund claiming 6.8 million on an unpaid loan is not exposed to that argument. A claimant who obtained three times his loss from a Texas jury is seriously exposed, and must frame his French claim accordingly.
5. Seize and sell, in order of liquidity
Once the title is obtained, every French enforcement procedure is open to the foreign creditor, exactly as to a French one. The order is not chosen at random: start with what turns into money fastest.
Attachment of debts (saisie-attribution) comes first. It allows any creditor holding an enforceable title for a liquidated and due claim to seize, in the hands of a third party, the sums that party owes the debtor (Article L. 211-1), and the act of seizure immediately transfers the attached claim to the creditor (Article L. 211-2). Bank balances, rents and receivables are attached this way in a day. Where a protective attachment is already in place, it is converted into an attachment of debts by a simple act served on the garnishee, and the creditor who froze the Paris account in the first month collects funds that could not leave it throughout the exequatur proceedings. The debtor has one month to challenge the attachment before the enforcement judge; after that, the garnishee pays. The mechanics specific to accounts, including the unattachable balance, are explained in our analysis of attaching bank accounts.
Shares and partnership interests fall under the seizure of intangible rights, open to any creditor holding an enforceable title for a liquidated and due claim (Article L. 231-1). The seizure makes the financial rights unavailable and leads, failing an amicable sale, to an auction whose reserve price is set by the seizing creditor, the debtor being able to apply to the enforcement judge if that price is manifestly inadequate (Article L. 233-1). A minority stake in an unlisted company sells badly. With an approval clause, worse still. It is nonetheless often the only way to reach a building held through a société civile, and the prospect of his shares being auctioned frequently leads the debtor to pay.
Seizure of real property is the slowest. It requires an enforceable title (Article L. 311-2), a payment order amounting to seizure published at the land registry, a directions hearing before the enforcement judge, then an authorised private sale or an auction, and distribution of the price according to the ranking of creditors: twelve to twenty-four months in all, longer if the debtor multiplies incidents. Its value depends entirely on what the état hypothécaire has revealed, since a property burdened with a first-ranking bank loan may leave nothing for an unsecured creditor. The full sequence is described in our analysis of seizing real property.
Last come the seizure and sale of tangible movables (works of art, vehicles, stock) and the arrest of ships, which turns on the nature of the claim and the vessel’s flag, and must be prepared before the yacht leaves French waters.
6. When the debtor organises his insolvency
A debtor who learns that proceedings have started in France almost always reacts the same way: the apartment is contributed to a new company, the shares are transferred to a relative, the account is emptied in favour of a structure outside the Union. A protective measure taken on the first day is the only truly effective protection against such manoeuvres, since an attached or charged asset can no longer be transferred free of charges. When it comes too late, three routes remain, of very unequal effectiveness.
The actio pauliana is the main one. Article 1341-2 of the Civil Code allows a creditor to act in his own name to have acts made by the debtor in fraud of his rights declared unenforceable against him, provided that, for an act for consideration, he shows that the counterparty knew of the fraud. The case law requires the claim to exist at least in principle on the date of the challenged act. That principle goes back to the contract or event that gave rise to the debt, well before the foreign judgment: an apartment contributed to a société civile while the New York proceedings were pending is therefore exposed. The act is not annulled; it becomes unenforceable against the pursuing creditor only, who can seize the asset in the third party’s hands as though it had never left the debtor’s estate. A gift to a child is undone easily; a sale at full price to a buyer in good faith is not.
The second route is to show that the interposed structure is a sham, or that its assets are commingled with the debtor’s: no corporate life, mixed accounts, personal expenses paid by the company. The burden is heavy, and the courts accept it only on precise evidence. It is sometimes available against a société civile set up three weeks after the foreign judgment, whose apartment the debtor still occupies without paying rent.
The third route is criminal, and it is the most overrated. Article 314-7 of the Criminal Code punishes with three years’ imprisonment and a 45,000 euro fine a debtor who organises or aggravates his insolvency to avoid enforcement of a financial judgment, but the text only covers judgments given by a criminal court or, by a civil court, in tort, quasi-tort or maintenance matters. An order to repay a loan or pay invoices, which is to say most foreign commercial judgments, falls outside it. Nor does the text say whether a foreign judgment not yet recognised is enough, and no leading decision settles the point to our knowledge. The threat of a criminal complaint is therefore, in most commercial files, a weak negotiating argument that the debtor’s counsel will recognise as such.
7. Arbitral awards take a separate, shorter route
Everything above applies to judgments. Arbitral awards made abroad follow their own regime, that of the New York Convention of 10 June 1958 and Articles 1514 et seq. of the Code of Civil Procedure, which is even more favourable to the creditor. Exequatur is granted by order, on application, without hearing the debtor, once the existence of the award is established and provided it is not manifestly contrary to international public policy (Article 1514). The debtor can challenge it only by appealing the order within one month of service, and only on the grounds exhaustively listed in Article 1520: the tribunal wrongly upheld or declined jurisdiction, was irregularly constituted, ruled without complying with its mandate, breached due process, or recognition would be contrary to international public policy.
Two features set this regime apart in practice. French courts grant exequatur even to an award set aside at the seat of the arbitration, because an international award is not anchored in any national legal order (Cass. 1re civ., 29 June 2007, Putrabali, No. 05-18.053), a solution that often surprises foreign practitioners. And an award not yet declared enforceable already allows protective measures without the judge’s prior leave, the Cour de cassation having treated it as a court decision for the purposes of the rule that dispenses with such leave (Cass. 2e civ., 12 October 2006, No. 04-19.062). The holder of an award made in London, Geneva or Singapore can therefore freeze the debtor’s accounts in the very week he discovers them, then obtain his exequatur order within a few weeks.
The procedure, the documents and the time limits for challenges are set out in exequatur of an arbitral award in France.
8. What strategy when the stakes are high
Files worth several million are not won by the number of procedures. They are won by their order. The sequence that works is always the same, and it is worth stating in one breath because each step conditions the next: the asset map and the état hypothécaire on day one, before any procedural expense, to find out what exists and what will actually be left for the creditor once registered creditors have been paid; the application to the enforcement judge on day two, covering in a single request every asset identified, accounts, sale proceeds held by a notary, shares and the vessel, so as not to reveal the strategy piecemeal and give the debtor time to empty whatever has not yet been targeted; measures carried out in decreasing order of liquidity, accounts and receivables first, charges next, tangible property last; the writ for exequatur served within the month, drafted at the same time as the application and not after it; and finally the negotiation, opened as soon as the debtor has grasped, on reading the notices of the measures, everything he can no longer do. Seizure of the property and the auction of the shares are launched only if that negotiation fails. And only if the creditor’s ranking leaves room for a surplus.
Three risks must be weighed before incurring costs. The first is ranking: a building worth eight million financed to the tune of six by a bank that is still owed leaves almost nothing, and the état hypothécaire says so before any expense. The second is insolvency proceedings: if the debtor is a company and proceedings open in France or another Member State, individual enforcement stops and the creditor files a proof of claim, subject to attachments of debts already made, which keep their effect. The third is the creditor’s own liability, since he may be ordered to compensate the loss caused by a protective measure that the judge has lifted (Article L. 512-2), which means calculating the claim precisely and not freezing more than necessary.
Time, finally, works against the creditor, and not only because assets move. Enforcement of a foreign judgment declared enforceable may be pursued for ten years only (Article L. 111-4). A comfortable period, on the face of it. It is no longer comfortable when the first years have been lost searching for assets.
In the New York fund’s file, the strategy therefore reads as follows: protective attachment of the Paris account and arrest of the yacht before the end of the season, judicial pledges over the shares in the société civile and the Lyon stake, a writ for exequatur within the month, and a settlement proposal sent to the debtor once the measures have been notified. Most files of this size are resolved at that stage. A creditor does not recover a judgment: he recovers assets.
Do you hold a foreign judgment against a debtor who owns assets or interests in France? Before starting exequatur proceedings, it pays to list every asset that can be reached and to decide in what order the measures should be taken, because that order decides the outcome. Hervé Guyader assists foreign creditors, and their counsel, in enforcing in France judgments and arbitral awards made abroad. His page on enforcing foreign judgments in France describes that work, and the contact form lets you outline a matter in a few lines, in English or in French.
Frequently asked questions
Is a foreign judgment directly enforceable in France?
It depends on where it comes from. A judgment given in a Member State of the European Union is enforceable in France without exequatur, on production of the certificate under Article 53 of the Brussels I bis Regulation (Article 39). A Swiss, Norwegian or Icelandic judgment must be declared enforceable by the clerk of the tribunal judiciaire, on a simple application, under the Lugano Convention. All others, including American and Canadian judgments and most English judgments, require adversarial exequatur proceedings before the tribunal judiciaire, which take six to eighteen months depending on the debtor’s resistance.
How long does it take to get paid in France on a foreign judgment?
For a European judgment, a few weeks are enough when the debtor has identified accounts in France. For a Swiss judgment, four to six months if there is no appeal. For an ordinary-law judgment, allow six to eighteen months of exequatur proceedings, then the time needed for enforcement itself: a day for an attachment of bank accounts, twelve to twenty-four months for a seizure of real property. Protective measures taken in the first month ensure the assets will still be there at the end, and often push the debtor to settle well before.
How can I find out whether my debtor owns assets in France?
Several public sources answer part of the question: the land register, through a request for an état hypothécaire at the land registry, for property held in the debtor’s own name, and the trade and companies register for shareholdings and directorships. The register of beneficial owners, on the other hand, is no longer open to the public, and a creditor has no access to it as such. Bank accounts appear in no public database: only the commissaire de justice can consult the national register of accounts, and only when acting under an enforceable title or an order authorising a protective attachment (Articles L. 152-1 and L. 152-2 of the Code of Civil Enforcement Procedures).
My debtor is selling or transferring assets to escape me: what can I do?
The most effective step is to act first: a protective attachment or a provisional judicial mortgage, obtained without an enforceable title and without notice to the debtor, prevents any transfer free of charges. If the transfer has already taken place, the actio pauliana under Article 1341-2 of the Civil Code can make it unenforceable against the creditor, provided the fraud is proved and, for a sale, the buyer’s knowledge of it. The offence of fraudulently organising insolvency under Article 314-7 of the Criminal Code, by contrast, does not apply to contractual judgments, which make up most commercial judgments.
Is an English judgment covered by the 2019 Hague Convention?
Only if the proceedings were instituted in England after the Convention entered into force for the United Kingdom on 1 July 2025, since Article 16 looks at the date the proceedings were started, not the date of the judgment. A judgment given in 2026 in proceedings begun in 2024 therefore falls under the ordinary law of exequatur, with the Cornelissen conditions. In both cases the French court must still be seised, and protective measures remain available before exequatur, under French law.
Further reading, by stage: securing the debtor’s assets before exequatur, on urgency; challenging exequatur of a foreign judgment, on the debtor’s defences; attaching a bank account, seizing real property and arresting a ship, on the assets.
French version: Faire exécuter un jugement étranger en France : récupérer son argent sur les biens du débiteur.