Enforcing a UAE arbitral award in Switzerland

Article 194 PILA, and a reservation that no longer exists

Article 194 of the Federal Act on Private International Law is a single sentence: the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards is governed by the New York Convention of 10 June 1958. It contains no reciprocity condition, no limitation to awards made in a Contracting State, and no commercial-matters limitation. It has never been amended.

On the treaty side, Switzerland ratified on 1 June 1965 and the Convention entered into force for it on 30 August 1965. It made a declaration under Article I(3) limiting the Convention to awards made in the territory of another Contracting State — the reciprocity limb only, not the commercial limb — and withdrew that declaration on 23 April 1993. The Swiss Confederation's own official party table now lists Switzerland with no marker for reservations or declarations, where states that maintain them carry one.

The practical effect of an unqualified Article 194 plus a withdrawn reservation is that the Convention regime reaches a foreign award whatever the seat state. For a UAE award the point does not need to be pressed: the UAE acceded on 21 August 2006, in force 19 November 2006, and likewise appears in the Swiss table with no reservation. Both sides are squarely inside the Convention.

Attachment first: Article 271(1)(6) DEBA

For most UAE creditors this is why Switzerland is on the list, so we put it before the procedure.

Article 271(1) DEBA lets a creditor attach a debtor's assets located in Switzerland for a claim that is due and not covered by a pledge. Ground no. 6 is available where the creditor holds a definitiver Rechtsöffnungstitel — a definitive title for dismissal of the debtor's objection — against the debtor. It was inserted with effect from 1 January 2011.

The chain that makes this work for an award creditor is tight. A foreign arbitral award qualifies as an enforcement title within Article 80(1) DEBA, and so is a definitive Rechtsöffnungstitel; therefore ground no. 6 is open; therefore Swiss assets, bank accounts included, can be attached without establishing any of the other grounds. There is no need to show the debtor is absconding, and no need to rely on the “sufficient connection to Switzerland” route in ground no. 4.

Two refinements, both useful and both from decisions of the Federal Supreme Court. First, the creditor does not need a formal declaration of enforceability in hand before applying for the attachment; making that a precondition has been held arbitrary. Second, the standard of scrutiny is graduated across three stages, and knowing which stage you are at prevents a lot of wasted argument:

Mechanically: Article 272(1) gives jurisdiction to the court at the place of debt enforcement or where the assets are located, on the creditor credibly demonstrating the claim, the ground and the assets. Article 278(1) gives any person whose rights are affected ten days to file an objection — and Article 278(4) is creditor-friendly: neither the objection nor an appeal suspends the effect of the attachment, so the freeze holds while it is challenged.

The validation clocks, and the Lugano trap

An attachment has to be validated, and the periods in Article 279 DEBA are short. If the creditor had not already begun enforcement or filed an action before the attachment was authorised, it must do so within ten days of service of the deed of attachment. If the debtor then files an objection to the summons for payment, the creditor has ten days from receiving its copy of the summons to apply for Rechtsöffnung or to sue on the claim — and if the Rechtsöffnung application is dismissed, ten days from notification to file the action. If no objection is filed, the continuation request is due within twenty days.

Now the trap, and it is on the face of the statute. Article 279(5) suspends those deadlines during objection proceedings and any appeal, and during proceedings for a declaration of enforceability under the Lugano Convention and any appeal. There is no equivalent suspension for New York Convention recognition proceedings. So a creditor who attaches first and then launches a stand-alone recognition application cannot assume the Article 279 clocks have stopped. They have not.

The same Lugano confinement affects Article 271(3) DEBA, under which the court also decides on enforceability in the ground no. 6 case where foreign decisions are to be enforced under the Lugano Convention. Arbitration is excluded from the Lugano Convention, so Article 271(3) is not a provision to cite for an award.

The enforcement mechanism, and where the Convention enters

Switzerland has no single statute on the enforcement of awards. A money award is enforced through debt enforcement under the DEBA, which Article 38 frames as proceedings for payment of money or provision of security, beginning with service of the summons for payment.

The sequence is: a request for enforcement under Article 67; a summons for payment under Article 69, which demands satisfaction within twenty days and tells the debtor that any contest must be declared within ten days; the debtor's objection under Article 74, within ten days of service and requiring no reasons; and the effect of that objection under Article 78(1), which is to suspend the proceedings.

Two details in Article 67 catch foreign creditors. The amount claimed must be stated in Swiss currency, so the award sum has to be converted. And a creditor resident abroad should elect a domicile for service in Switzerland; failing that, service is deemed to be at the debt enforcement office itself.

The creditor's route past the objection is Article 80(1) DEBA: where the claim rests on an enforceable judicial decision, the creditor may apply for the objection to be set aside — definitive Rechtsöffnung. One point of honesty here, because it is commonly misstated: neither Article 80(1) nor the list in Article 80(2) mentions arbitral awards anywhere. The proposition that a foreign award is a definitive Rechtsöffnungstitel is case law, not statutory text, and rests on the Federal Supreme Court's holding that foreign awards qualify as enforcement titles within the meaning of Article 80(1).

Then Article 81(3) DEBA is the provision that actually carries the Convention. Where the decision was issued in another state, the debtor may raise, in addition to the ordinary defences, those provided in the relevant treaty or, failing a treaty, in the PILA. For a UAE award the relevant treaty is the New York Convention — so Article 81(3) DEBA is the statutory gateway through which Article V enters the Rechtsöffnung. That is the cleanest way to state the mechanism, and it is more precise than saying the Convention applies directly.

Note also the asymmetry in Article 81(1): discharge and deferral must be proved by documents, whereas prescription need only be invoked. Jurisdiction lies with the court at the place of debt enforcement under Article 84(1), in summary procedure, and Article 84(2) requires that court to notify its decision within five days of hearing the debtor.

Recognition of the award therefore happens incidentally, as a preliminary question inside the Rechtsöffnung, rather than in a free-standing exequatur action — the Federal Supreme Court has held that a decision on enforceability capable of acquiring res judicata force is reached only at that stage.

The stand-alone route — and proceedings in English

A separate declaration is available, and since 2021 there is an express statutory basis for it that older summaries do not mention. Article 251a(1)(g) CPC places “recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards (Art. 194 PILA)” under the summary procedure. It was inserted with effect from 1 January 2021, and the current wording of the Article 251a(1) list dates from 1 January 2025.

So the creditor has two routes, and the statute itself distinguishes them: incidental recognition inside the Rechtsöffnung under Articles 80 and 81 DEBA, or a stand-alone recognition and enforceability application under Article 251a(1)(g) CPC. In practice they are often combined in a single application.

And there is a provision here worth knowing about that is rarely mentioned. Article 251a(2) CPC permits cantonal law to provide that, on the application of all parties, English may be used as the language of the proceedings where English was used for the arbitration agreement or as the language of the arbitration. For a UAE-seated arbitration conducted in English — which is most of them — that can remove a translation burden and a layer of cost.

Why Article 193 PILA is not your provision

Article 193 PILA provides for deposit of an award with the state court at the seat of the arbitral tribunal and for the issue of a certificate of enforceability. It is tempting, and it is not available for a UAE award. Three independent reasons:

• Scope. Article 176(1) PILA confines Chapter 12 to arbitral tribunals seated in Switzerland. Article 193 sits in Chapter 12.
• The text presupposes a Swiss seat. Both the deposit and the certificate are routed to the state court at the seat of the arbitral tribunal, which for a UAE seat is not a Swiss court; and the tribunal's own certificate under Article 193(3) measures the award against the PILA.
• The legislature has drawn the distinction expressly. In the same list, Article 251a(1)(f) CPC covers deposit and the certificate of enforceability under Article 193 PILA, while Article 251a(1)(g) separately covers recognition and enforcement of foreign awards under Article 194. Two letters, two provisions, two different objects.

A related provision that is sometimes confused with enforcement: Article 185a PILA allows a tribunal seated abroad, or a party to foreign arbitration proceedings, to ask a Swiss court for assistance with interim measures and the taking of evidence. That is court assistance to a foreign arbitration, not recognition of its award.

No review on the merits

The Rechtsöffnung court does not re-examine the award. The Federal Supreme Court has held that, within the Convention's scope, whether recognition and enforcement must be refused is determined exclusively under Article V, and that Article V lists the refusal grounds exhaustively. The same reasoning records the Article III principle that the Convention leaves the procedure of recognition and enforcement to national law — which is precisely why the DEBA machinery, and not the Convention, supplies the mechanics.

The sequence familiar from the rest of this series applies here too. A pending annulment action in the UAE under Article 53 of the Federal Arbitration Law is not an award set aside or suspended, and so does not make out the Article V(1)(e) ground.

Prescription: not ten years, and why

This is the point on which we would most expect a published summary to be wrong, and the error is easy to make because the Swiss general rule is so familiar. Article 127 of the Code of Obligations prescribes claims after ten years unless federal civil law provides otherwise, and Article 137(2) provides that where a claim is established by judgment of the court the new period is always the ten-year one.

Neither of those is the starting point. Article 148(1) PILA provides that prescription and extinction of a claim are governed by the law applicable to the claim. The Federal Supreme Court has applied that to a foreign award: so far as substantive law falls to be applied within a debt enforcement, the PILA determines which law governs, and even after recognition of a foreign decision whether prescription has occurred is determined by the law applicable under Article 148. In the case in question the court proceeded on the basis that the ordinary prescriptive period was governed by the law of Singapore, the seat state.

So for a UAE-seated award on a UAE-law-governed contract, prescription of the award claim is in principle a question of UAE law, not of Articles 127 and 137 of the Code of Obligations. Those provisions bite only where Swiss law is the law applicable to the claim. A flat assertion of “ten years in Switzerland” would be wrong, and it is the kind of error that costs a creditor a case rather than merely embarrassing an article.

One further reason not to lean on Article 137(2): it speaks of a judgment of the court and does not mention an arbitral tribunal or an award, whereas the neighbouring Article 135(2), on interruption, expressly names an arbitral tribunal alongside a state court. The legislature named the tribunal where it meant to include it. That is a real textual argument, and it cuts against assuming an award is assimilated to a judgment for Article 137(2) purposes. It is an argument and not an authority: we found no decision applying Article 137(2) to an arbitral award.

If the debtor is a state: Binnenbeziehung

Switzerland has no comprehensive state immunity statute, but it is not purely judge-made either. Two DEBA provisions operate in the background: Article 92(1)(11) places outside distraint the assets of a foreign state or a foreign central bank that serve sovereign purposes, and Article 30a reserves treaties of international law and the PILA.

What is judge-made is the framework, and the Federal Supreme Court has set out three cumulative conditions for a creditor seeking to attach a foreign state's Swiss assets:

1. the state must not have acted sovereignly (iure imperii) in the underlying legal relationship, but as a bearer of private rights (iure gestionis);
2. the relationship must show a sufficient Binnenbeziehung — a sufficient domestic connection to Swiss territory; and
3. assets serving sovereign purposes are excluded, by reference to Article 92(1)(11) DEBA.

The second condition is the one that defeats award creditors, and the court has spelled out its negative content in terms that should be read carefully by anyone considering Switzerland for a state debtor. A Binnenbeziehung is sufficient where the debt relationship was created in Switzerland, or is to be performed there, or where the state took acts in Switzerland establishing a place of performance. It is not sufficient that the state's assets are located in Switzerland — nor that the claim was awarded by an arbitral tribunal seated in Switzerland.

And because the requirement is an expression of Swiss domestic law rather than of international law, a state's waiver of its international-law immunity does not cure its absence. The court has also held that Binnenbeziehung is a procedural prerequisite that the Convention does not displace: examination of the Article V grounds presupposes the procedural admissibility of the proceedings in which that examination is to take place, and Article III leaves the procedure to national law.

For a UAE award against a state respondent with no Swiss nexus beyond the assets themselves, that is the single biggest obstacle, and it is not an Article V question at all.

One caveat on weight which we state rather than gloss: the two modern decisions setting out this framework both arose from attachment proceedings reviewed only for arbitrariness under Article 9 of the Federal Constitution. Their holdings are properly read as “it is not arbitrary to…” rather than as unqualified propositions of law.

Two treaties can be set aside for a UAE creditor. The European Convention on State Immunity (Basel, 1972) binds a small number of states and the UAE is not among them, so it does not assist or hinder. The UN Convention on Jurisdictional Immunities of States and Their Property of 2004 has not entered into force, and Swiss judgments use it only as evidence of customary international law; the Federal Supreme Court has held it does not follow from that Convention that a state waives execution immunity merely by concluding an arbitration agreement.

What we produce in the UAE

The Article IV documents, with a certified translation where required — though note that the Federal Supreme Court is reported to take a non-formalistic view of the Article IV requirements, and that Article 251a(2) CPC may allow the proceedings to run in English; the consular legalisation chain through MOFAIC and the Swiss mission in the UAE, there being no apostille route; and the UAE-law certificate on the Article V(1)(e) position.

Switzerland adds one item the other destinations do not need, and it follows from the prescription analysis above: because Article 148(1) PILA refers prescription to the law governing the claim, a Swiss enforcement will turn on a UAE-law opinion on prescription — when the claim and the award claim prescribe under UAE law, and whether anything has interrupted the period. That is squarely our work, and it is the part of a Swiss file a foreign firm cannot produce. The remainder of the pack is on the UAE-side pack.

What this page does not state, and why

• A prescription period for a UAE award in Switzerland. Article 148(1) PILA refers the question to the law governing the claim, so there is no Swiss number to give. Whether Article 137(2) of the Code of Obligations would in any event treat an award like a judgment is open: we found no decision applying it to an arbitral award, and the contrast with Article 135(2) cuts the other way.
• That there is authority applying Article 194 PILA to an award from a non-Contracting State. The universality conclusion follows from the unqualified statutory text plus the withdrawn reservation, and we present it that way rather than as a holding. It does not need resolving for a UAE award.
• The detailed rules on state bank accounts. The direction of the case law favours creditors — immunity by reference to the nature of an asset requires dedication to a concrete sovereign purpose, and general assertions of sovereign allocation do not suffice — but we have not read those decisions in the original and we will not reduce them to a rule here. We also found no decision holding that a diplomatic mission's bank account is protected regardless of the ordinary analysis: Article 22(3) of the Vienna Convention on its own terms covers mission premises, furnishings, property therein and means of transport, and not bank accounts. We do not assert blanket protection either way.
• That Article 84(1) DEBA or Article 251 lit. a CPC have been applied by the Federal Supreme Court specifically to a Rechtsöffnung founded on a foreign arbitral award. We cite those provisions as statute, not as case law.
• Cantonal practice, court fees, and which canton to proceed in — which for a bank-asset case is driven by where the assets sit.

Sources

• Federal Act on Private International Law (IPRG/LDIP, SR 291) — Articles 148(1), 176(1), 185a, 192(2), 193 and 194, read in the German consolidated text on Fedlex.
• Federal Act on Debt Enforcement and Bankruptcy (SchKG/LP, SR 281.1) — Articles 30a, 38, 67, 69, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81, 84, 92(1)(11), 271(1)(6), 271(3), 272, 278 and 279, read in German. Article 271(1)(6) was inserted with effect from 1 January 2011.
• Swiss Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO/CPC, SR 272) — Articles 251 lit. a, 251a(1)(f), 251a(1)(g) and 251a(2). Article 251a was inserted with effect from 1 January 2021; the current wording of the paragraph (1) list dates from 1 January 2025.
• Code of Obligations (OR/CO, SR 220) — Articles 127, 135(2) and 137(2).
• Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards, New York, 1958 (SR 0.277.12) — Articles I(3), III, IV and V. Switzerland: ratified 1 June 1965, in force 30 August 1965; Article I(3) reciprocity declaration withdrawn 23 April 1993, the original text of which is published at United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 536, p. 477. UAE: accession 21 August 2006, in force 19 November 2006; no reservation.
• Federal Supreme Court — BGE 144 III 360 (foreign awards as definitive enforcement titles under Article 80(1) DEBA; prescription governed by the law applicable to the claim under Article 148 PILA); BGE 144 III 411 (Article 271(1)(6) attachment on a foreign award; the graduated standard of scrutiny; the negative content of Binnenbeziehung); BGE 149 III 318 (no formal prior declaration of enforceability required for the attachment; the three cumulative conditions for attaching a foreign state's assets).
• Federal Law 6 of 2018 on Arbitration, as amended by Federal Decree-Law 15 of 2023 — Articles 53, 54(2) and 56, which govern what the UAE-law certificate can say.

Statutes and decisions checked 4 November 2026 against Fedlex and bger.ch, in the German texts. English is not an official language of the Swiss Confederation: Fedlex states that its English versions are for information only and have no legal force, and the Federal Supreme Court publishes no official English versions of its decisions. Every English rendering on this page is ours, from the German. Swiss procedure is confirmed with Swiss counsel before filing; we act on the UAE side.

UAE award, Swiss assets?

If there are bank assets to reach, the attachment ground at Article 271(1)(6) is usually the first move and the Article 279 clocks start running immediately after it. Send us the award and we will prepare the UAE-side evidence, including the prescription opinion that Article 148(1) PILA makes decisive, before anything is filed in Switzerland.

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