Opinion ID: 767723
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Waiver of FSIA Immunity

Text: 26 Before the trial court, TASK also argued that China (and therefore SFTC) had implicitly waived its sovereign immunity because China was a signatory to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Arbitral Awards (the Convention). The district court properly rejected the argument. 27 In Seetransport, we held that Romania, by becoming a signatory to the Convention and entering into a contract with an arbitration clause and participating in arbitration proceedings, had waived its sovereign immunity for the purposes of challenging U.S. jurisdiction over a suit to enforce the arbitral awards resulting from that contract. See 989 F.2d at 578-79. Moreover, after dismissing the claim for enforcement of the arbitration awards as time-barred, we found that a separate claim to convert a Paris Court of Appeals judgment, which dismissed the Romanian company's direct appeal of the arbitration awards, into a U.S. judgment had to be allowed under the same exception because the cause of action is so closely related to the claim for enforcement of the arbitral award. Id. at 583. 28 Although one of the judgments in this case orders SFTC to pay VSL the amount awarded TASK in an arbitral award against VSL, there are differences between this case and Seetransport that preclude any direct application of our holding in that case to these facts. The judgment before us did not result from a direct appeal of the arbitral award, as in Seetransport, but rather from a suit by VSL against SFTC for indemnification. The judgment ordering indemnification -- and not a judgment reviewing (and confirming) the arbitral award itself -- is what TASK seeks to enforce in our courts. Because the implied waiver exception is to be construed narrowly, see Drexel Burnham Lambert Group, Inc., 12 F.3d at 325, and because it is hard to view this suit as being in essence a suit designed to enforce an arbitral award, we believe that the exception is inapplicable to this case.