Brazil promulgates the Hague Service Convention

Brazil acceded to the 1965 Convention on the Service Abroad of Judicial and Extrajudicial Documents in Civil or Commercial Matters in November 2018 and, last month, President Jair Bolsonaro promulgated the so-called Service Convention through Decree 9,734/2019. The Ministry of Justice and Public Security (MJSP) has been designated the Central Authority to process incoming applications for service of judicial and extrajudicial documents without the need for legalisation or notarisation.

Currently, the Hague Service Convention has 74 members, including China, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Norway, the UK and the USA. It intends to facilitate the transmission of documents on civil and commercial matters between parties living or operating in different contracting states, by way of standardisation of forms and procedures.

Prior to the Convention, foreign service of documents upon persons abroad had to be done via a letter rogatory or a specific set of procedures established in bilateral agreements which, in most cases, takes several months to be processed – sometimes, the service cannot even be processed due to the lack of an international cooperation agreement between the countries involved.

Brazil had some notable reservations regarding the modes of service and repelled some of the optional provisions of the Convention, namely:

• Except for the standard forms annexed to the Convention (request for service, summary of the proceedings and certificate of service) all documents sent to Brazil must be translated into Portuguese to produce their legal effects (Arts. 5 and 7 of the Convention)
• The application form can only be signed by the MJSP or by the competent judge (Art. 6)
• Some forms of service, such as by post, diplomatic channels or directly to the Brazilian judicial authority, will not be accepted in Brazil (Art. 8)

The Service Convention will come into force as from 1 June 2019, when parties in contracting states will be able to notify or serve summons on parties in Brazil, under its terms.

It is to be expected that, regardless of the reservations made by the Brazilian government to the original text of the document, the Convention will allow for a faster and cheaper process and help integrate Brazil with the prevailing international procedural practices.

Brazil has been a Member of The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) since 2001 and this is the eighth HCCH Convention to which it is a contracting party.

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