Originally from Enforcement of Money Judgments

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I.  PRESENT ATTITUDE TOWARD ENFORCEMENT OF FOREIGN MONEY JUDGMENTS

A. Describe the receptiveness of your government (including courts) toward enforcement of foreign money judgments.

In general terms, judges are hesitant of recognizing foreign judgments and awards in Ecuador. 

A new Ecuadorian Civil Procedure Act (COGEP) was approved in May 2015. COGEP introduced a myriad of procedural reforms to the Ecuadorian procedural system, including important reforms regarding the homologation and execution of foreign judgements and arbitral awards. After only over two years applying the COGEP the law was changed again. 

In August 2018 a new Law was enacted. The Law for Promotion of Production (LPP) amended the framework for the enforcement, only of arbitral awards, deleting the homologation procedure present in the COGEP. Foreign court judgments are still subject to the homologation process before they can be executed. Although the LPP, intends to simply the execution of awards it seems it was not done with sufficient thoroughness to fully change the process.

However, on august of 2021, the Regulations of the Arbitration and Mediation Law (RALM) were enacted in Ecuador and had undergone significant revisions. One of the most important provisions clarified, at least to a large extent, that arbitral awards should not be subject to a process of recognition. In order to provide a solution to this problem, the first paragraph of Article 15 establishes that:

[t]he awards rendered in an international arbitration proceeding, whether the seat of arbitration is within or outside Ecuadorian territory, shall have the same effects and shall be enforced before the same judge and in the same manner as awards rendered in a domestic arbitration proceeding, without the prior requirement of a homologation process.