CL-2024-000260 - [2025] EWHC 2539 (Comm)

Fecha: 07-Oct-2025

The question of enforcement

The question of enforcement

26.

The question of enforcement of the Award is not for determination by the Court on this application. Section 68(2)(g) is not addressing enforcement of an Award: Nigeria v P&ID at [483].

27.

A passage cited for the Claimants from the decision of Diplock J in London Export Corporation Ltd v Jubilee Coffee Roasting Co. Ltd. [1958] 1 W.L.R. 271 at 277 (which was cited in the Court of Appeal’s decision in Soleimany v Soleimany [1999] EWCA 285; [1999] QB 785) in my view helps show the difference of the enforcement stage to the stage of a section 68 challenge. The passage reads:

"When the arbitration agreement has been construed and no breach of the agreed procedure found there may nevertheless arise a second and quite separate question: that is, whether, as a matter of public policy, a particular award, made pursuant to that agreed procedure, ought not to be enforced and ought, therefore, to be set aside; for an arbitrator's award, unless set aside, entitles the beneficiary to call upon the executive power of the state to enforce it, and it is the function of the court to see that that executive power is not abused."

28.

In his oral argument, to support the contention that section 68 should be available to the Claimants in the present case, and without conceding the Claimants’ position on enforcement, Mr Wassouf argued that public policy could not be invoked at the stage of enforcement because of the terms of section 66 of the 1996 Act. He referred to the fact that section 66, in contrast to section 103(3), does not refer to public policy in terms.

29.

Again, the question of enforcement is not for determination by the Court on this application, but I respectfully doubt that the Court is required to enforce an award if enforcement would be contrary to public policy: see Soleimany v Soleimany (above) at p 798.