Foreign Judgment in UK Law

But it is submitted for the bank that the language of section 9(2)( d) must be construed as qualified by the common law rule that the unsuccessful party who has been sued to judgment is not permitted to challenge that judgment on the ground that it was obtained by fraud unless he is able to prove that fraud by fresh evidence which was not available to him and could not have been discovered with reasonable diligence before the judgment was delivered.

Different considerations might arise if the judgment had been obtained through conscious wrongdoing, for example by pursuing proceedings in defiance of an injunction, but that is not this case.

The court will not simply consider whether the steps taken abroad would have amounted to a submission in English proceedings. Conversely, it does not necessarily follow that because the foreign court would not regard the steps as a submission that they will not be so regarded by the English court as a submission for the purposes of the enforcement of a judgment of the foreign court. The question whether there has been a submission is to be inferred from all the facts.

In the first place, we are not familiar with modes of procedure in many foreign countries, and it may not be easy to be sure that a particular issue has been decided or that its decision was a basis of the foreign judgment and not merely collateral or obiter.

And I think that it would be right for a court in this country, when faced with a claim of issue estoppel arising out of foreign proceedings to receive the claim with caution in circumstances where the party against whom the estoppel is raised might not have had occasion to raise the particular issue.

First, the claimant must satisfy the court that in relation to the foreign defendant there is a serious issue to be tried on the merits, i.e. a substantial question of fact or law, or both. Third, the claimant must satisfy the court that in all the circumstances the Isle of Man is clearly or distinctly the appropriate forum for the trial of the dispute, and that in all the circumstances the court ought to exercise its discretion to permit service of the proceedings out of the jurisdiction.

Leaving aside all possibility of embarrassment in our foreign relations (which it can be said not to have been drawn to the attention of the court by the executive) there are - to follow the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals - no judicial or manageable standards by which to judge these issues, or to adopt another phrase (from a passage not quoted), the court would be in a judicial no-man's land: the court would be asked to review transactions in which four sovereign states were involved, which they had brought to a precarious settlement, after diplomacy and the use of force, and to say that at least part of these were "unlawful" under international law.