Three years after the signing of the Arrangement on Reciprocal Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters by the Courts of the Mainland and Hong Kong SAR (the ‘Arrangement’), the Mainland Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters (Reciprocal Enforcement) Ordinance (Cap. 645) (the ‘Ordinance’) has finally come into force on 29 January 2024.
We first wrote about the potential benefits of the Ordinance in December 2022.
The Hong Kong Government has also announced that the PRC-equivalent of the Ordinance will be implemented in the PRC by judicial interpretation promulgated by the Supreme People’s Court.
The Ordinance formally implements the Arrangement originally signed on 18 January 2019 and sets out the procedure and mechanisms for registering judgments in civil and commercial matters to facilitate the reciprocal enforcement of such judgments between Hong Kong and the PRC. Most notably, the Ordinance eliminates the requirement for an exclusive jurisdiction agreement in Hong Kong or PRC (as applicable), which was needed in order to fall under the ambit of the Mainland Judgments (Reciprocal Enforcement) Ordinance (Cap. 597) (the ‘MJREO’), and greatly expands the scope of enforceable judgments to cover monetary and non-monetary judgments in civil and commercial matters, whereas the MJREO only covers monetary judgments in commercial matters. However, it should be noted that registration must be made within 2 years from a party’s default in complying with an applicable PRC judgment (s10(1)(b)). Read more
