The Post-Brexit Enforcement Gap

For two decades, an English court judgment crossed into the European Union almost on rails. A creditor with a London judgment could have it recognised in Bucharest, Madrid or Warsaw with little more than paperwork. On 1 January 2021, the rails were lifted.

What replaced them is not a wall but a patchwork — several regimes, each with its own keyhole, and a real gap in the middle that catches contracts drafted as if nothing had changed. If your agreement still assumes the old automatic route, you may be holding a judgment you cannot easily use.

What changed

Brussels I Recast was the engine: it made judgments from one member state recognisable and enforceable in another with no fresh look at the merits. It ceased to apply between the UK and the EU for proceedings begun on or after 1 January 2021. The UK asked to join the Lugano Convention, which would have restored much of the old comfort; the EU has not agreed. So the default fell back to a mix of older conventions and, where they don’t reach, national law.

What’s left — and where the gaps are

Two Hague Conventions now do most of the work. The 2005 Choice of Court Convention enforces judgments, but essentially only where the parties agreed an exclusive jurisdiction clause — asymmetric or non-exclusive clauses, common in finance, may fall outside it. The 2019 Judgments Convention is broader and closer in spirit to the old regime, but it is recent — in force for the UK only since mid-2025 — and carries its own exclusions and timing rules.

Between and around these sit the cases the conventions don’t reach, where you are back to the private-international-law rules of the country where you want to enforce: slower, less predictable, and more expensive.

The practical test

For most commercial contracts the question collapses to a short path.

This piece is general comparative information about cross-border enforcement, not legal advice, and does not create a lawyer–client relationship. The conventions carry exclusions, transitional rules and live points of interpretation; any specific matter needs advice on its own facts and on the current state of the instruments.