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อัปเดตล่าสุดเมื่อ 5 กันยายน 2569

Updated 14 August 2026. You won your case abroad. The money, the company, or the land sits in Thailand. What happens next depends entirely on which piece of paper you are holding. A foreign court judgment cannot be enforced in Thailand and sends you back to the start of a fresh trial. A foreign arbitral award can be enforced, through a court petition, on a three-year clock. This guide covers both routes, what each costs, how long each takes, and the clause you should have written before any of this happened.

คำตอบสั้นๆ

Thai law draws a hard line between a judgment handed down by a foreign court and an award handed down by an arbitral tribunal. The line decides everything that follows.

	Foreign court judgment	Foreign arbitral award
Enforceable directly in Thailand	เลขที่	Yes, on conditions
What you file	A fresh civil action on the original claim	A petition to enforce the award
กฎหมายที่ใช้บังคับ	No statute. Supreme Court practice only	Arbitration Act B.E. 2545 (2002), sections 41 to 45
Deadline to start	The Thai prescription period for the underlying claim	Three years from the date the award became enforceable
Can the Thai court reopen the merits	Yes, completely	No. It reviews procedure and public policy
Realistic timeline	12 to 24 months at first instance, longer on appeal	Months, if unopposed. Longer if the debtor resists

Why Thailand does not enforce foreign court judgments

No Thai statute provides for the recognition or enforcement of foreign court judgments. Thailand has signed no bilateral judgment-enforcement treaty, and it is not a contracting party to the 2019 Hague Judgments Convention, which as of 2026 binds the European Union, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Uruguay, Albania, Andorra and Montenegro.

Nothing fills the gap. The consequence is blunt. Inside Thailand, your foreign judgment is not a judgment at all. It is a document.

What actually happens when you bring a foreign judgment to Thailand

You file a fresh action on the original claim

To reach a Thai debtor’s assets, the creditor starts a new civil case in a Thai court on the underlying cause of action: the unpaid invoice, the breached contract, the loan that was never repaid. You plead it under Thai law and you prove it again from the beginning. The foreign judgment goes into the file as evidence of what happened, not as an order the Thai court has to obey.

Three conditions before the judgment counts as evidence

แบบไทย ศาลฎีกา practice sets three conditions before a foreign judgment is admissible in Thai proceedings:

1. the judgment is final in the country that issued it, meaning no appeal is pending and none can still be brought;
2. it came from a court with subject-matter jurisdiction;
3. it does not contravene public order or the คุณธรรมที่ดี of the Thai people.

Judgments on the merits, after proper notice and a real chance to defend, carry weight. Default judgments and rulings decided on procedural technicalities carry much less, because the Thai court can see that nobody tested the facts.

Evidence is not authority

Satisfy all three conditions and the Thai court still owes you nothing. It weighs the foreign judgment alongside the rest of the evidence, applies Thai law to the claim, and can reach a different result on the same facts. Foreign counsel routinely underestimates this. Winning in London does not mean winning in Bangkok. It means arriving in Bangkok with good evidence.

The prescription trap

This is the risk that costs people the entire claim, and no competing English-language page mentions it.

Because the Thai action runs on the underlying claim, the relevant Thai ระยะเวลาการสั่งยา is the one attached to that claim. Under the ประมวลกฎหมายแพ่งและพาณิชย์ the default is ten years from the date the claim arose (section 193/30), but many commercial and trade claims fall under much shorter periods. A creditor who spent four years litigating in New York may land in Thailand holding a fresh judgment on a claim that expired here while the foreign case was running.

Section 193/32 gives a ten-year prescription to a claim established by a final judgment, and creditors reach for it. Whether a Thai court will apply it to a ต่างประเทศ judgment, given that Thai law does not treat a foreign judgment as establishing anything, is not settled in the published sources. Do not build a recovery plan on it. Get Thai advice on the prescription position before the foreign case ends, not after.

Foreign arbitral awards: the route that works

อนุญาโตตุลาการ is a different world. Thailand acceded to the New York Convention on 21 December 1959, and it came into force here on 20 March 1960. The Arbitration Act B.E. 2545 (2002), amended by the Arbitration Act (No. 2) B.E. 2562 (2019), follows the UNCITRAL Model Law.

Section 41: the treaty gate

Section 41 makes an award binding on the parties whichever country produced it. Its second paragraph is the sentence that matters most to a foreign creditor: an award made abroad is enforceable by a Thai court only if it is subject to an international convention, treaty or agreement to which Thailand is a party, and only to the extent Thailand has agreed to be bound. Enforcement is conditional, not automatic. In practice the New York Convention is the gate almost every foreign award walks through.

Section 42: three years, and what you file

Section 42 carries both halves of the filing step. The party seeking enforcement applies to the competent court within three years from the day the award became enforceable. The same section lists the documents:

• the original arbitral award or a certified copy;
• the original arbitration agreement or a certified copy;
• a Thai translation of both, made by a translator who has taken an oath before the court, or certified by an authorised official or by a Thai embassy or consulate in the country where the award was made.

The translation requirement quietly sinks timelines. Sworn translation of a long award takes weeks, and a translation the court rejects sends you back to the start. Budget for it early. Our notes on legal interpreters in Thai courtrooms และบน notarisation and legalisation cover what Thai courts accept.

Sections 43 and 44: when the court can refuse

Section 43 lists six grounds, and the burden sits on the party resisting enforcement, who has to prove them: ความไร้ความสามารถ of a party; an arbitration agreement not binding under the chosen law or, failing a choice, under Thai law; lack of proper notice of the tribunal’s appointment or of the proceedings; an award that goes beyond the scope of the agreement; a tribunal or a procedure that departed from what the parties agreed; and an award not yet binding, or set aside or suspended where it was made.

Section 44 lets the court dismiss the application on its own assessment, on two grounds: the dispute is not capable of settlement by arbitration under Thai law, or enforcement would be contrary to public policy.

Read together these mirror Article V of the New York Convention. The court checks the process, not the reasoning. A losing party who simply disagrees with the tribunal has nothing to argue.

Section 45: appeal goes straight to the Supreme Court

Section 45 bars appeals against a court order under the Act except on five grounds: recognition or enforcement is contrary to public policy; the order or judgment is contrary to a provision of law concerning public policy; the order or judgment does not match the award; a judge dissented; or the order concerns interim protective measures under section 16. The appeal goes to the Supreme Court, or to the Supreme Administrative Court where the case started there, skipping the ศาลอุทธรณ์ entirely. That is unusual, and worth knowing before you plan a timeline. Compare the ordinary route in our guide to Supreme Court appeals in Thailand.

Setting aside and refusing enforcement are not the same thing

Readers conflate these constantly, and every competing page lets them.

Setting aside runs under section 40. A party asks the court to annul an award, within 90 days of receiving it. Succeed and the award is destroyed for everyone.

Refusing enforcement runs under sections 43 and 44. The court declines to lend its machinery to this enforcement attempt. The award survives and the creditor can still try to enforce it in another country where the debtor holds assets.

Different applications, different sections, different deadlines, different consequences. Getting the label wrong loses time you may not have.

Public policy in Thai practice, and the Hopewell warning

Here is the part other pages leave out.

Thai courts have read “public policy” under sections 40 and 44 more expansively than courts in comparable New York Convention jurisdictions read Article V(2)(b), and the gap widens when the award runs against a state entity. Thai academic writing has criticised the pattern as excessive judicial intervention. If your counterparty is a Thai ministry, a state enterprise, or a concession grantor, price that risk in.

The Hopewell dispute shows the reach. A Thai Arbitration Institute tribunal awarded Hopewell roughly THB 11.8 billion against the Ministry of Transport and the State Railway of Thailand in September 2008 over the terminated Bangkok elevated road and rail concession. The Central Administrative Court annulled the award in March 2014 on prescription grounds, treating prescription as a matter of public policy. The Supreme Administrative Court reinstated the award in March 2019, refusing to apply a 1999 prescription period retroactively to a 1998 termination. A Constitutional Court ruling in March 2021 reopened the question, a retrial was granted, and on 18 September 2023 the Central Administrative Court held the claim time-barred under section 51 of the Administrative Courts Act. Reporting since indicates no payout has been made and further appeal has been raised.

Thirty years from concession to whatever this now is. The lesson is not that Thai enforcement fails. Commercial awards between private parties are enforced routinely. The lesson is that public policy in Thailand is a live door, and it opens widest against the state.

What the Supreme Court has actually done with that door

Decision 5560 to 5563/2562 is the one to read first, because it says what the standard is. The Court held that neither the Arbitration Act nor any other statute defines public order or the good morals of the people, so the court has to exercise judgment case by case, against the circumstances of the dispute and the values of the time. What it must weigh is the protection of the public benefit, public services and the direct interests of the public at large, and not the private interests of the party that lost. If your objection is really that the award went against you, this is the decision that says so.

Decision 6292/2561 shows the door opening only part of the way, which is the outcome most creditors should expect. The parties had chosen Thai law in a share purchase agreement, and the tribunal awarded compound interest, interest upon interest. The Court held that this offends section 224 paragraph two of the ประมวลกฎหมายแพ่งและพาณิชย์ and so met the public policy test, and it refused enforcement of that part of the award only. The rest stood and the debtors remained liable on simple interest. A public policy objection does not have to destroy an award to be worth making, and it does not destroy one just because it succeeds.

Decisions 13570/2556 and 7635/2562 both turn on prescription, and they are the reason the Hopewell pattern is not a one-off. In 13570/2556 the tribunal miscalculated a limitation period because the claimant had typed the wrong year on its own claim form, and the Court set the award aside: enforcing an award that got prescription wrong would itself offend public order. In 7635/2562 the Court sent the case back because the lower court had answered the wrong question, asking whether the award was contrary to law instead of whether enforcing it would be contrary to public order, and it then fixed the date of loss for a stolen vehicle at the day the การขโมย was reported rather than the day the car was handed over. Thai courts will look at how a tribunal reached a limitation date, through the public policy gate.

Decision 840/2561 is the warning for anyone enforcing against Thai real estate. The applicant was a บริษัทจำกัด registered in the British Virgin Islands, so a foreign นิติบุคคล and an alien under clause 3 of Revolutionary Council Announcement No. 281 of 24 November 2515 (1972). A juristic person in that position can hold a condominium unit only if it fits one of the categories in section 19 of the Condominium Act B.E. 2522, and the route it relied on, section 19(4), requires a BOI investment promotion certificate. It did not have one, so it was not qualified to take title under its own purchase agreement. Winning the award is not the end of the question. Check that the asset can lawfully be held by the entity you are enforcing for.

After the order: the writ of execution

An enforcement order is permission, not payment. If the debtor still does not pay, you take the judgment to the Legal Execution Department (กรมบังคับคดี) of the Ministry of Justice, which has offices nationwide. It can attach and auction movable and immovable property, garnish bank accounts, salaries and receivables, and register liens over land.

Section 274 of the Civil Procedure Code requires the writ of execution to be applied for within ten years of the judgment becoming final. Applications filed after that are dismissed without anyone looking at the merits. Older sources cite section 271, the pre-2017 numbering, so check which edition you are reading.

So a foreign award holder runs two clocks in sequence: สามปี to petition for enforcement, then สิบปี to execute. Miss either and the award becomes a souvenir.

ค่าใช้จ่ายเท่าไหร่และใช้เวลานานแค่ไหน

Thai court filing fees are public and computable. For a monetary claim the fee is 2% of the amount claimed, capped at THB 200,000 for claims up to THB 50 million, with a further 0.1% on the excess above THB 50 million, plus about THB 1,000 for court delivery costs. The fee is paid on filing.

A worked example. You hold a US judgment for THB 30 million against a Thai company. There is no shortcut: you file fresh in Thailand. Court fee at 2% is THB 600,000, capped down to THB 200,000. Add sworn translation of the foreign judgment and the contract file, Thai counsel, and 12 to 24 months to first-instance judgment, longer if the defendant appeals. Then, on winning, up to ten years to execute.

The same THB 30 million as an arbitral award is a petition under section 42, decided on documents, usually inside a year unless the debtor mounts a section 43 challenge. That difference is the whole argument for the next section. If the debt itself is the problem rather than the forum, our debt collection service in Thailand is often the faster first move, and สิ่งที่ควรรู้ก่อนขึ้นศาลในประเทศไทย covers what litigating here actually involves.

The exception: foreign divorce and family status

Family status escapes all of this, and the confusion it causes is unnecessary.

A foreign divorce judgment is not enforced through the courts. It is recorded administratively. Translate it into Thai, legalise it through the Department of Consular Affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then present it to a district office, which can record the change in the family status register on form Kor Ror 22. Recording is not automatic and the registrar has discretion, but it does not involve re-litigating your divorce. People who have read that “Thailand does not recognise foreign judgments” often assume their divorce is void here. It is not. See divorce in Thailand with a foreign marriage.

Write the clause that prevents all of this

Everything above is a post-mortem. The cure costs ten lines at signature.

If you contract with a Thai counterparty and you may one day need to collect, choose arbitration over a foreign court. A foreign court judgment buys you a fresh trial in Thailand. An arbitral award buys you a petition. Then name, in the clause itself:

• the institution, by its full name: the Thai Arbitration Institute (TAI), the Thailand Arbitration Center (THAC), SIAC, HKIAC or the ICC;
• the seat, which fixes which courts supervise the arbitration;
• the language, because Thai-language proceedings change your cost base entirely;
• the governing law. Note that under the 2019 amendment foreign representatives still cannot act in arbitrations in Thailand where the dispute is governed by Thai law, so this choice decides who can represent you;
• the number of arbitrators, one for smaller disputes, three when the sums justify it;
• an escalation step, requiring negotiation or mediation before either side files.

Put it in the agreements that carry real money: สัญญาเงินกู้, promissory notes, ข้อตกลงรักษาความลับ และ employment agreements. If you are still at the structuring stage, การจัดตั้งธุรกิจในประเทศไทย และ พระราชบัญญัติธุรกิจต่างประเทศ set out who you will be contracting as.

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ThaiLawOnline สามารถช่วยเหลือคุณได้อย่างไร

We have advised foreign clients on Thai law since 2006. If you are holding a judgment or an award and the assets are here, we will tell you plainly whether it is worth pursuing before you commit to fees: which route applies, what the prescription position looks like, what enforcement will cost, and what the debtor is likely to argue. If you are still at the contract stage, the arbitration clause is a short conversation that can save you a second trial. Start with our overview of dispute resolution in Thailand, then get in touch.