Cour de cassation 1ère Chambre civile; 2023-03-01; 1ère Civ. 1er mars 2023, pourvoi n°21-23-510
Decision by national courts in the field of European Union law — ECLI:FR:CCASS:2023:C100135
Date: 2023-03-01
Subject matter: Judicial cooperation in civil matters
Origin: France

82023FR0301(51)_ENG_SUMJURE
JURE summary
JURE summary
This judgment by the Cour de Cassation (hereinafter ‘the Supreme Court’) concerned an exequatur procedure.
As the company SC Biamos Com (hereinafter ‘the company’) went bankrupt, the company Bogdalex Import Export (hereinafter ‘defendant 1’) sued its administrator (hereinafter ‘the plaintiff’) for recovery before the Romanian courts; much later, it served to the plaintiff three Romanian judgments as well as a certificate that those judgments were enforceable.
The plaintiff challenged this certificate but was unsuccessful before the cour d’appel de Versailles (hereinafter ‘the Court of Appeal’).
It appealed to the Supreme Court.
It claimed that the Court of Appeal changed the subject-matter of the dispute and infringed Article 4 of the CPP (1) when it examined an alternative claim before the principal claim. The Supreme Court responded that the Court of Appeal did not change the subject-matter of the proceedings because the claims were independent.
The plaintiff also invoked Article 33(2) of the Brussels I Regulation (2), which provides that ‘[any] interested party who raises the recognition of a judgment as the principal issue in a dispute may, in accordance with the procedures provided for in Articles 2 and 3 of this Chapter, apply for a decision that the judgment be recognised’.
The plaintiff claimed that the Court of Appeal wrongly held that the defendant 1 was an interested party. It argued that the mere fact that the defendant 1 was admitted as a creditor to the collective procedure of the company SC Biamos Com did not mean that it was entitled to have the contentious judgments enforced.
The Supreme Court responded that the exequatur in itself was not an act of enforcement, so that the Court of Appeal rightly considered defendant 1 to be an interested party to the exequatur of judgments that recognised it as a creditor. The Supreme Court relied on Article 38(1) of the Brussels I Regulation, which provides that ‘[a] judgment given in a Member State and enforceable in that State shall be enforced in another Member State when, on the application of any interested party, it has been declared enforceable there’.
For those reasons, the appeal was dismissed.
(1) Code de procédure civile (Civil Procedure Code).
(2) Council Regulation (EC) No 44/2001 of 22 December 2000 on jurisdiction and the recognition and enforcement of judgments in civil and commercial matters.