JUDGMENTBY: SPROULE, J, TERRELL, J

SPROULE, J The plaintiff applied ex parte by summons under the Reciprocal Enforcement of Judgments Enactment for leave to register in Johore, the default judgment for a money debt obtained by him against the defendants in the Supreme Court at Singapore.

Plaintiff could have applied without process by merely producing his office copy or exemplification of judgment, although in such cases a summons may be directed to be filed.

If the application had been granted, the registration would have been provisional. An order nisi would have had to be served on the defendant, and time and opportunity given to him to show cause, if so advised, why final registration should not be allowed.

Section 3 (2) of the Enactment sets out the grounds upon which a judgment debtor could found such opposition. At this stage I content myself with saying that these grounds are a resume of the well-settled defences to which a debtor is restricted in a suit to enforce a foreign judgment.

In my view, a judgment holder is entitled under the Enactment and Rules to his provisional order as a matter of course, and an onus is cast upon the debtor to assail registration later, he having already suffered judgment in the original Court. In our case the burden was in fact thrown upon the judgment creditor, instead, to support his judgment and not as against his debtor, but against the Court. With great respect, I do not think the Court would be justified in so acting except in some such extreme case as that the foreign judgment was so manifestly incompetent as to render the application on the face of it an abuse of the process of the Court.

In our case the point raised by the Court, so far from being manifest, was very debatable. The Singapore writ had been served by substituted service; but no argument was based upon that; and indeed, the Johore Court could have solved any such argument by insisting upon personal service of the provisional order. The sole ground taken by Thorne, J., in refusing the application was that, by reason of clause (c) of Section 3 (2) of the Enactment, no default judgment is capable of registration.

The history of reciprocal enforcement of judgments between different parts of His Majestys dominions and protectorates is recent. Until 40 Geo. III c. 90, a Scottish or Irish judgment could only be enforced in England (and Vice Versa), like any other foreign judgment, by a suit. That cause of action still survives, and has come to be regulated by well settled common law principles. A foreign judgment is treated as creating obligation and agreement compelling the defendant to pay the judgment debt. He is only allowed to assail its validity upon certain restricted grounds.

The Statute of George III in 1800 was the first attempt to facilitate the enforcement in one part of the United Kingdom of the decrees of the Courts of another. The machinery was that of exemplification and is still employed to enforce judgments more complicated than those for debts, damages, or expenses dealt with in the later Legislation of 1868 and 1920.

The Judgments Extension Act of 1868 first introduced the machinery of registration of money judgments as between England, Scotland and Ireland. That machinery was extended by Part II of the Administration of Justice Act 1920 to the Empire at large, provided that each Dominion, Colony or Protectorate seeking admission into this comity, should first pass reciprocal legislation upon the same lines. Hence the Johore Enactment now in question.

Now I have studied a great number of cases, but do not propose to state here any more than the bare result of such research, of the correctness of which I am convinced. Study shews, as logic demands, that the same principles which apply to a suit upon a foreign judgment, affirming its validity and restricting the defences available in answer to it, have been applied to applications under the Acts of 1800 and 1868; and that these principles are embodied in

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