Uganda is not a Section 44A reciprocating territory
India's Section 44A of the Code of Civil Procedure allows money decrees from a short list of
reciprocating territories to be directly executed in India without a fresh suit. That list -- the
United Kingdom, Singapore, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Trinidad and Tobago, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and
Niue, the Trust Territories of Western Samoa, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Aden, and the UAE --
does not include Uganda, consistent with every other country this platform has found on this point
except the UAE. This platform confirmed this via a secondary legal-services compilation, though it did
not locate a single consolidated primary Gazette compilation during this research.
The Section 13 route for enforcing a Uganda family-court decree
Because Uganda is not a reciprocating territory, a maintenance, divorce-settlement, or other money
decree obtained from a Ugandan court cannot simply be filed for direct execution in an Indian court.
Instead, the decree-holder must file a fresh civil suit in India under Section 13 of the Code of Civil
Procedure, treating the Ugandan judgment as evidence -- the suit is subject to the conclusiveness
exceptions set out in Section 13 (for example, whether the Ugandan court had proper jurisdiction, and
whether the proceedings were conducted in accordance with natural justice).
Uganda's own plural family-law framework
Separately from the enforcement question, Uganda itself operates a plural family-law framework not
unlike its plural succession-law system -- statutory law coexists with customary marriage practices and
Islamic family-law practice under the separate Marriage and Divorce of Mohammedans Act within the
Muslim community. This platform did not deep-dive Uganda's own domestic family-law statutes in this
round of research, since the core relevance to NRIs connected to Uganda is the cross-border enforcement
question addressed above.
Common mistakes people connected to Uganda make:
- Assuming a Ugandan family-court decree can be directly executed in India, when it cannot.
- Not preserving certified copies of the Ugandan judgment and proceedings needed to support a
Section 13 suit in India.
- Overlooking that OCI status does not itself affect jurisdiction or enforcement questions in
either country's courts.
