By a ruling of March 12 2025 (Cass. 1st civ., n° 23-16.855), the Court of cassation confirms the refusal of exequatur in France of a judgment rendered by default in the United States, on the ground that the fundamental rights of the defense had not been sufficiently guaranteed.
The facts An American company had obtained in Virginia, in 1999, a judgment by default condemning a Russian director to pay more than 3 million dollars of damages and interests. More than twenty years after this decision, the creditor solicited before the French jurisdictions its exequatur in order to be able to act on assets situated in France.
The decision of the Court of cassation The Court recalls that in the absence of international convention applicable, the French judge must notably verify that the foreign decision respects the international public order of procedure. In the present case, several elements led to the refusal of exequatur:
- it was not established that the defendant had effectively received the summons in time useful to prepare his defense;
- the plaintiffs did not demonstrate that the preparatory report having led to the judgment by default had been regularly notified to him;
- the notification of the judgment itself was not either established, depriving thus the interested [party] of the possibility to exercise usefully a recourse.
The Court of cassation approves from then on the court of appeal to have retained that the interests of the defendant had been objectively compromised by a violation of the fundamental principles of the procedure. The American judgment and the order having extended its effects could not therefore be coated with the exequatur in France.
Practical scope This ruling recalls that a foreign judgment, even definitive and enforceable in its State of origin, will not necessarily be recognized in France. The effective respect of the adversarial [principle] and of the rights of the defense remains a fundamental requirement of the control exercised by the French judge of the exequatur. For international creditors, this decision underlines the importance of preserving and producing the proofs of notification of the essential acts of the foreign procedure as well as of the decision itself. In practice, the demonstration of the respect of procedural guarantees constitutes often one of the major stakes of the exequatur procedures engaged before the French jurisdictions.