Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Judgments in Brazil: Preliminary Studies on the Procedure in the BRICS Countries

Abstract

Perhaps the most critical step in international litigation is effectiveness, i.e, enforcing a judgment rendered in a foreign jurisdiction. From a global perspective, the enforcement of foreign judgments is generally a complex field, governed by a variety of approaches in different jurisdictions, involving a mixture of bilateral and multilateral conventions and jurisdiction-specific procedural laws, rules and regulations. The approaches to recognition and enforcement of judgments differ widely around the world, hence the importance of analyzing the similarities and differences between foreign legal systems that will be the subject of study in comparative law. The research regarding the recognition and enforcement of foreign judgment in each of the BRICS member countries began with the speech we delivered at the Euro-Asian Law Congress, ‘Ninth Session, Law and national interests in modern geopolitics - Expert Group: International and national mechanisms of dispute settlement in Euro-Asian Region’, held on June 18-19, 2015, in Yekaterinburg, Russia. This article is the beginning of a larger research project where, in the end, we intend to bring a comparative picture of the system in each of the BRICS countries. In this paper we will deal with the Brazilian legal system, detailing all the steps to be faced to have a foreign decision recognized in Brazil.