Enforcing arbitral awards in the OHADA area: takeaways from 17 June 2026 webinar
An award is only worth as much as its enforcement. Notes from a webinar on the enforcement of awards in the OHADA area, a setting that sheds light on questions which matter well beyond it.
On 17 June 2026, Lead up took part in a webinar on the enforcement of arbitral awards in the OHADA area, held together with Thiam & Associés and Delos. Baptiste Rigaudeau’s intervention dealt with how the applicable instruments interact, and with what recent reforms mean, in practice, for the holder of an award.
Thus, the starting point is straightforward, and it holds across jurisdictions: obtaining a favourable award is only one step. The economic value of an award is measured by the ability to enforce it, against a private party, but above all against a State or a public entity, which has resistance tools of its own. As a result, the OHADA area offers a particularly clear illustration, because of a recently reshaped framework.
There, enforcement sits at the intersection of several texts: the 1958 New York Convention, to which most member States are parties; the Uniform Act on Arbitration, revised in 2017, and the role of the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration; and, for enforcement, the Uniform Act organising simplified recovery procedures and enforcement measures (AUPSRVE), revised in 2023. It is less each text taken on its own than the way they interact that determines, in practice, the outcome of an enforcement attempt.
The reform with the greatest consequences concerns immunity from execution. Indeed, the new Article 30 of the AUPSRVE, in force since 16 February 2024, now reserves immunity to public-law legal persons alone, save in cases of express renunciation, i.e. the State, local authorities and public establishments. Conversely, it withdraws it, in theory, from public enterprises set up in corporate form. The distinction between a public establishment and a State-owned company then stops being theoretical: it governs what may be attached or enforced against, and how.
The concrete value of an award cannot be ascertained at the enforcement stage: it must be secured at the inception of the contract.
These developments shift the difficulty upstream. Whether an award can be collected is often decided well before any dispute, at the stage of drafting the dispute-resolution clause, choosing the seat, structuring the counterparty and identifying attachable assets. The possibility of an express waiver of immunity, for instance, raises drafting questions better addressed at signature than discovered at enforcement. The detail of those choices is a matter for case-by-case analysis, turning on the counterparty, the jurisdiction and the assets at hand.
The same discipline, treating enforcement as a strategy that begins at the drafting stage, rather than a problem to be solved once the award is rendered, applies in the other settings where enforcement against States or public entities is in issue. The OHADA area is only one of them.
Our sincere thanks to the organizers for the invitation and to the other stellar panellists and audience members for the stimulating conversation on such important issues.