Enforcement Deadlines for Foreign Arbitral Awards and Judgments
July 29, 2025
In a recent decision, Amaplat Mauritius Ltd. v. Zimbabwe Mining Development Corp. (2025), the D.C. Circuit held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act’s exceptions for implied waivers and arbitral award enforcement do not apply to proceedings to enforce foreign judgments, even when the judgment is based on an underlying arbitral award. The decision creates a split with the Second Circuit and underscores the major differences between enforcing foreign judgments and enforcing foreign arbitral awards in the United States.
Amaplat highlights one key difference in particular: the statute of limitations. The Federal Arbitration Act has a three-year deadline for enforcing foreign arbitral awards that is notoriously short by international standards, and far shorter than the fifteen-year deadline that most U.S. states provide for foreign judgment enforcement. In the past, practitioners have navigated around the Federal Arbitration Act’s short deadline by enforcing a foreign award in a foreign country with a longer deadline and then enforcing the resulting foreign judgment in the United States. Amaplat casts grave doubt on that strategy when the award debtor is a foreign sovereign entity. The decision also calls out a deeper problem that Congress should fix: The Federal Arbitration Act’s three-year deadline for enforcing foreign arbitral awards is simply too short.
Foreign Award and Judgment Enforcement
Foreign arbitral award enforcement and foreign judgment enforcement serve similar ends. In both cases, a party has obtained a decision on the merits from a foreign tribunal and now seeks to convert that decision to a judgment in another forum to obtain access to that forum’s attachment, execution, and asset discovery tools. Despite that kinship in purpose, however, the U.S. laws governing award and judgment enforcement diverge dramatically.
The United States ratified the New York Convention in 1970 to provide for the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards, and Congress implemented the treaty by enacting Chapter 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act. That statute provides jurisdiction in federal court, ensuring largely uniform procedures. It also prescribes a streamlined process for enforcement that borrows from federal motions practice.
By contrast, there is no federal statute for the enforcement of foreign judgments. The United States has signed the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention, but it has not yet ratified the treaty, much less enacted implementing legislation. As a result, judgment enforcement normally proceeds under state law. Most states have enacted some version of the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act, which mitigates the variation. But differences remain. Moreover, the absence of a federal statute means that judgment enforcement must often be pursued in state court, unless there is another basis for federal jurisdiction.
Award and judgment enforcement diverge even further when the respondent is a foreign sovereign or state-owned entity. The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 generally grants foreign sovereign entities immunity from jurisdiction in U.S. courts, but it provides exceptions. One exception applies when the sovereign has waived its immunity, either expressly or by implication. There are good arguments that this exception applies when the sovereign agreed to arbitrate, because award enforcement can reasonably be viewed as a step in the agreed-upon dispute resolution process. That argument is harder to make for judgment enforcement. In addition, Congress amended the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act in 1988 to add an exception that expressly covers enforcement of arbitral awards rendered in New York Convention states.
Another important difference is the deadline for enforcement. The New York Convention does not prescribe a statute of limitations for award enforcement, but Congress added a three-year deadline in the Federal Arbitration Act. That deadline is quite short by international standards. For judgment enforcement, by contrast, the Uniform Act effective in most U.S. states prescribes a fifteen-year deadline.
The Federal Arbitration Act’s short deadline poses a quandary for creditors seeking to enforce foreign awards more than three years old. One approach is to confirm the award in a foreign country with a longer deadline (usually but not necessarily the arbitral seat) and then enforce the resulting judgment in the United States. The D.C. Circuit and the Second Circuit have both blessed that strategy in prior cases. But the strategy works only if the creditor does not give up crucial rights when shifting from the award enforcement regime to the judgment enforcement regime. That problem was front and center in Amaplat.
The Amaplat Decision
In the late 2000s, two Mauritian mining companies, Amaplat Mauritius Ltd. and Amari Nickel Holdings Zimbabwe Ltd., sought to develop nickel and platinum mines in Zimbabwe. They entered into contracts with a state-owned entity, the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation. That state-owned entity later terminated the contracts, and Amaplat and Amari brought arbitral proceedings pursuant to the contracts’ arbitration clauses. In 2014, an International Chamber of Commerce tribunal seated in Zambia awarded $47 million. The Zambian High Court then entered a judgment confirming the award.
In 2022, Amaplat and Amari brought enforcement proceedings in the United States. Because the three-year statute of limitations to enforce the arbitral award itself had already run, they instead sought to enforce the Zambian judgment confirming the award under the District of Columbia’s version of the Uniform Foreign-Country Money Judgments Recognition Act. The district court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss on sovereign immunity grounds.
The D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that neither the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act’s arbitration exception nor the Act’s implied waiver exception applied. The court explained that the arbitration exception by its terms applies only to proceedings to enforce foreign arbitral awards, not foreign judgments, even when the judgment rests on an underlying arbitral award. The court found the implied waiver exception inapplicable too. Even assuming that a foreign sovereign implicitly consents to arbitral enforcement by signing the New York Convention and agreeing to arbitrate in a New York Convention state, the court refused to extend that logic to judgment enforcement. The New York Convention, it noted, says nothing about recognizing foreign court judgments based on awards.
The D.C. Circuit acknowledged that the Second Circuit had reached a contrary result in Seetransport Wiking Trader Schiffarhtsgesellschaft MBH & Co. v. Navimpex Centrala Navala (1993). The Second Circuit reasoned that an action to recognize a foreign judgment based on an arbitral award was within the scope of the implied waiver exception because “the cause of action is so closely related to the claim for enforcement of the arbitral award.” But the D.C. Circuit deemed this connection too insubstantial to infer an intent to waive immunity.
Implications for Sovereign Enforcement
Amaplat is bad news for creditors seeking to enforce arbitral awards against foreign sovereigns outside the three-year limitations period. The express conflict with Seetransport could set the stage for Supreme Court review. But in the meantime, Amaplat may shut down an otherwise viable strategy for avoiding the three-year limitations period. Amaplat has no effect on enforcement against private entities – a context where the earlier D.C. Circuit and Second Circuit cases blessing the two-step workaround remain good law. But the impact on sovereign enforcement is obvious.
One solution is to file within three years of the award. But that is not always an optimal strategy. Arbitration enforcement, particularly against recalcitrant foreign sovereigns or state-owned entities, is often a multi-year iterative process of investigation, lobbying, settlement negotiations, and legal proceedings around the globe. The nature and location of a foreign state’s assets and commercial dealings will fluctuate over time, as will the creditor’s knowledge about those recovery targets and the foreign government’s own willingness to engage. Although many award creditors prefer to file promptly in the United States to obtain access to robust discovery tools, others reasonably prefer to wait until they learn about assets in the country. The three-year limitations period creates needless urgency, forcing creditors to file early in the United States solely for fear of losing access to the U.S. enforcement regime if needed at a later stage. Amaplat aggravates that problem in sovereign cases by eliminating one way to wait and see.
The more fundamental lesson from Amaplat is one for Congress: The Federal Arbitration Act’s three-year deadline for arbitral award enforcement is too short. There is no good reason why the limitations period for foreign award enforcement should be a scant one-fifth as long as the prevailing fifteen-year period for foreign judgment enforcement. The three-year deadline is also quite short by international standards and sets a bad example for a country that normally strives to be pro-enforcement.
The three-year period may fall in the heartland of limitations periods for ordinary contract or tort claims. But that is not a sensible comparison. Ordinary statutes of limitations are designed to spur parties to resolve disputes when the facts are still fresh in witnesses’ minds and the documents are still available. That interest is greatly attenuated when the parties have already litigated a dispute on the merits and all that remains is enforcement of the resulting decision. Similarly, the debtor’s interest in repose is much diminished when that party has already litigated on the merits and lost, yet still refuses to pay.
It is anyone’s guess when Congress will next tinker with the details of the Federal Arbitration Act. But this issue should definitely feature on practitioners’ wish lists. Amaplat is a byproduct of a deeper problem that Congress should fix.