COLOMBIA Law and Practice Contributed by: Juan Mendoza, Manuela Hernández Contreras, Andres Parra and Daniel Munera, DRET
very similar elements to the recognition of an interna - tional award as established in the New York Conven - tion. The four grounds a party may invoke are: • Incapacity of a party or invalidity of the arbitration agreement. • Lack of proper notice or a genuine denial of the right of the party to present its case. • An award that rules beyond what the parties sub - mitted to arbitration. • An irregularity in how the tribunal was composed or the proceedings were conducted. Two further grounds can be raised by the court on its own initiative, regardless of whether either party argued them: • That the subject matter was not arbitrable. • That the award violates Colombia’s international public policy. A Summary Procedure, With No Further Appeal The procedure is summary by design. A party must file for annulment within one month of being notified of the award; the other side then has one month to respond, and the court must decide within two further months. Filing an annulment action never suspends enforcement of the award, and the court’s decision on annulment cannot itself be appealed further. The Threshold Question: Is This Actually an Award? Before any of the grounds listed above can even be reached, however, a threshold question must be answered: is the challenged decision actually an award? The Supreme Court addressed this directly in 2025, in a case involving a tribunal that had issued a standalone partial ruling on whether an arbitration was domestic or international, without yet touching the underlying contractual dispute. One party sought annulment, arguing that the tribunal itself had labelled the ruling an “award”. The Court disagreed, hold - ing that “the character of an arbitral award does not depend on the label assigned to it, but on the true nature of the decision it contains” – and that only a decision resolving, even partially, the actual claims
and defences in dispute qualifies as an award sub - ject to annulment. A ruling that merely organises the arbitration’s procedural framework, however it is titled, falls outside Article 107 altogether. 11.2 Excluding/Expanding the Scope of Appeal According to the disposition outlined in Article 107 of Law 1563, parties have meaningful room to shape the scope of annulment themselves, but only in one specific circumstance. Where none of the parties are domiciled or resident in Colombia, they may, through an express statement in the arbitration agreement or a later written agreement, exclude the annulment action entirely, or limit it to one or more of the avail - able grounds. Once at least one party is domiciled in Colombia, that option is off the table – annulment then applies on its ordinary, full terms, regardless of what the parties might otherwise prefer. Waiving annulment carries a consequence of its own. An award seated in Colombia is ordinarily treated as a domestic award for enforcement purposes – directly enforceable, with no recognition proceeding required. Once the par - ties waive annulment, that changes: even though the award remains seated in Colombia, it must then go through recognition, in the same way a foreign-seated award would. 11.3 Standard of Judicial Review The standard of judicial review is strictly deferential and procedural, not a review of the merits. A court hearing an annulment action cannot revisit the sub - stance of the dispute, reopen the evidentiary record, or question the tribunal’s legal interpretations. The Supreme Court has made this a settled principle, holding that the grounds for annulment “look only at the procedural aspect of the arbitration” and that annulment “is not a means to review the substantive issues contained in the award, much less the criti - cal, logical or evidentiary assessments on which it is based”.
12. Enforcement of an Award 12.1 New York Convention
Colombia ratified the 1958 New York Convention through Law 39 of 1990, without reservations for
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