5.1 A Introduction

5.1. Private international lawyers often use the composite phrase “recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments” to describe a subset of their area of study but in practice, most legal proceedings of that kind are concerned with enforcement in one country of a judgment obtained in another. Disputes about judicial sales of ships fall into the less-often-litigated category of recognition of foreign judgments. The typical situation is where a claimant seeks in one country to enforce a pre-existing maritime claim against a ship that has been sold as a result of judicial proceedings in another country. The question for the court in which the claim has been brought is whether, and how, to recognise the effect of the foreign court-ordered sale of the ship so as possibly to preclude the claimant from continuing with its claim in the local proceedings.