Recognition of Foreign Judgments in Brazil: the Court That Decides, the Rule the Guides Get Wrong, and How Long It Really Takes

Published August 26, 2026. Also available in Portuguese.

You have a judgment from a court in your own country — a divorce decree, a money judgment, a custody order, an adoption — and the person, the asset or the registry it needs to reach is in Brazil. The English-language internet now agrees on the first sentence of the answer: recognition of foreign judgments in Brazil runs through a single court, the Superior Tribunal de Justiça (STJ), and until that court homologates the decision it has no effect here. That much is true as a general rule — the exceptions have a section of their own below — and the better pages say it. What they get wrong — including the newest and most visible of them — is the rule the STJ actually applies today when it asks whether your judgment is "final" enough, the reason an uncontested case moves quickly, and how long the process genuinely takes. Of the eleven English-language pages we read on this subject in August 2026, not one names the current articles of the court's internal rules correctly and states the finality standard the court has applied since 2018. One still cites a resolution that was revoked in 2014.

The short version. Recognition — the Brazilian term is homologação, and the STJ's case class is HDE, Homologação de Decisão Estrangeira — is a formal proceeding, not a re-trial. The court checks a closed list of requirements and does not reopen the merits. If every interested party consents in writing, the case never leaves the court's Presidency and is decided by a single judge — which is why, in the consensual cases we measured on the court's own public docket, the whole process ran in two to five months, not the "six to eighteen" the leading guide publishes. If the other side has to be summoned, add months; if they contest, the case goes to a panel of the court's most senior justices and is measured in years. And homologation is the middle of the road, not the end: what you do after — a registry certificate for civil-status cases, an enforcement action before a federal court for money — is governed by its own provisions, which this article covers to the end.

One boundary before we start. This article is about bringing a foreign judgment into Brazil. It is not about enforcing a Brazilian judgment abroad — that depends on the law of the country where you are, and no Brazilian statute can answer it. It also stops short of two neighbouring subjects we cover separately: the power of attorney you will need to act in Brazil without travelling, which has its own article on hiring a Brazilian lawyer from abroad, and what happens when the recognised judgment is part of an estate — for that, see inheritance in Brazil as a foreign heir.

One court for the whole country — and how to watch your own case

Jurisdiction over recognition is constitutional. Article 105 of the Brazilian Constitution assigns it to the STJ — a competence it received from the Supreme Federal Court in the 2004 judicial reform:

i) a homologação de sentenças estrangeiras e a concessão de exequatur às cartas rogatórias; (Incluída pela Emenda Constitucional nº 45, de 2004)

i) the homologation of foreign judgments and the granting of exequatur to letters rogatory; (Included by Constitutional Amendment No. 45 of 2004)

Two practical notes fall straight out of that provision. First, the amendment is 45/2004 — one of the eleven pages we read attributes the transfer to a "Constitutional Amendment nº 05/2004", which does not exist; if a guide misnames the constitutional basis, check its other citations too. Second, because there is exactly one court, there is exactly one docket, and it is public. Every recognition case is filed under the class HDE and can be followed by anyone at the STJ's consulta processual — filing date, current location, each procedural step, no login required. None of the pages we read tells the client this, and it is the single most reassuring thing a person abroad can know about their own case: you do not have to take anyone's word for where the file is.

The procedure itself sits in two instruments that work together: articles 960 to 965 of the Code of Civil Procedure (Law 13,105/2015) and articles 216-A to 216-N of the STJ's internal rules, the RISTJ, in the consolidated text the court publishes — the chapter was created by Regimental Amendment 18/2014 and reworded by Regimental Amendment 24/2016. That 2014 amendment is also why any page still describing the procedure under "STJ Resolution 9/2005" is out of date by more than a decade: the resolution was replaced by those very articles. One of the eleven pages we read still cites it as governing law.

When you do not need the STJ at all

Before planning a homologation, check whether your case is in the one category the statute expressly carved out. Since the 2015 Code, a consensual foreign divorce does not need the STJ:

§ 5º A sentença estrangeira de divórcio consensual produz efeitos no Brasil, independentemente de homologação pelo Superior Tribunal de Justiça.

§ 5. A foreign judgment of consensual divorce produces effects in Brazil independently of homologation by the Superior Tribunal de Justiça.

That is article 961, paragraph 5, of the Code, and for the pure case — the divorce itself, both spouses in agreement, no Brazilian court order needed on custody, support or property — the route is registral, not judicial: the divorce is annotated directly on the Brazilian marriage record under the National Council of Justice's registry rules, and paragraph 6 lets any judge examine the foreign decree's validity if the question ever arises in a case before them. Where the "consensual" divorce also decides custody of minors, alimony or a property division you need to enforce in Brazil, practice treats it as outside the carve-out and back on the STJ route — the boundary runs between dissolving the marriage and enforcing what was decided alongside it. Our Portuguese-language article on the homologation process covers that borderline in detail.

Three more boundary cases, briefly. Interlocutory decisions — freezing orders, interim measures — do not travel by homologation at all: article 960, paragraph 1, sends them through letters rogatory, and article 962 governs the enforcement of foreign urgent measures, including those granted without hearing the defendant, provided the defendant is heard later. Treaties prevail: article 960's head paragraph makes the whole regime subsidiary to any treaty in force between Brazil and the country of origin, so the first question in any file is whether one exists. And foreign arbitral awards go to the same court but under their own statute — article 35 of the Arbitration Act (Law 9,307/1996, as amended in 2015) subjects them "solely" to STJ homologation, with the test set by articles 38 and 39 of that Act and by the New York Convention rather than by the provisions this article describes.

The six requirements — and what the court refuses to look at

The checklist is short, closed, and worth reading in full. Article 963 of the Code:

Art. 963. Constituem requisitos indispensáveis à homologação da decisão: I - ser proferida por autoridade competente; II - ser precedida de citação regular, ainda que verificada a revelia; III - ser eficaz no país em que foi proferida; IV - não ofender a coisa julgada brasileira; V - estar acompanhada de tradução oficial, salvo disposição que a dispense prevista em tratado; VI - não conter manifesta ofensa à ordem pública.

Article 963. The following are indispensable requirements for the homologation of the decision: I – that it was rendered by a competent authority; II – that it was preceded by regular service of process, even where default was established; III – that it is effective in the country where it was rendered; IV – that it does not offend Brazilian res judicata; V – that it is accompanied by an official translation, except where a treaty dispenses with it; VI – that it does not contain a manifest offence to public policy.

The internal rules add the documentary side — article 216-C requires the original or a certified copy of the decision, officially translated by a sworn translator in Brazil and, "where applicable", consular legalisation (a qualifier the apostille section below resolves) — and article 216-F restates the public-policy bar in a triple formula that echoes article 17 of the LINDB, the introductory law that has governed this boundary since 1942 — with one difference of wording worth noticing: the internal rules protect national sovereignty, human dignity and public policy, where the LINDB's older triad speaks of sovereignty, public policy and good morals:

Art. 17. As leis, atos e sentenças de outro país, bem como quaisquer declarações de vontade, não terão eficácia no Brasil, quando ofenderem a soberania nacional, a ordem pública e os bons costumes.

Article 17. The laws, acts and judgments of another country, as well as any declarations of will, shall have no effect in Brazil when they offend national sovereignty, public policy and good morals.

One ground of refusal lives outside that list and decides more cross-border family cases than any item on it. Article 964 of the Code bars homologation altogether where Brazilian jurisdiction is exclusive:

Art. 964. Não será homologada a decisão estrangeira na hipótese de competência exclusiva da autoridade judiciária brasileira. Parágrafo único. O dispositivo também se aplica à concessão do exequatur à carta rogatória.

Article 964. The foreign decision shall not be homologated where the Brazilian judicial authority has exclusive jurisdiction. Sole paragraph. This provision also applies to the granting of exequatur to letters rogatory.

The exclusive list is in article 23 of the same Code: actions concerning real property situated in Brazil; in succession matters, the confirmation of a private will and the estate proceeding and partition of assets situated in Brazil; and the division of assets situated in Brazil in divorce, separation or dissolution of a stable union. This is why a foreign grant of probate cannot be homologated into moving a Brazilian apartment, however valid it is at home — the point our article on inheritance in Brazil as a foreign heir develops — and why the property clauses of a foreign divorce that reach Brazilian real estate may be refused or severed even where the divorce itself is recognised. When part of a judgment crosses that line, partial homologation, covered below, is what saves the rest.

What the court will not do is retry your case. The STJ itself describes its role as a juízo meramente delibatório — a purely formal review: it verifies the checklist and stops. In a 2024 Corte Especial decision the court put it in one sentence: the STJ "exercises a merely delibative review in foreign-judgment cases, its task being only to verify whether the request meets the requirements of the CPC, the RISTJ and the LINDB". Whether the foreign court weighed the evidence correctly, whether the damages are too high, whether you should have won — none of that is on the list, and the defence is not allowed to raise it, as the next sections show. The requirements that actually decide contested cases are II (was the defendant properly served under the law of the country where the case ran — the STJ tests service by the foreign forum's rules, not Brazil's) and VI (public policy). And item III — effectiveness — is where the leading guides have the law wrong, so it gets a section of its own.

The finality trap: the rule the top-ranking guides state is not the rule the court applies

Here is what the newest, best-positioned English-language guide on this subject tells you, published in August 2026: that your judgment "must be final and binding — trânsito em julgado (res judicata)", citing article 216-D, III of the STJ's internal rules and a 1964 Supreme Court precedent, Súmula 420. Another prominent guide says an order "under appeal" cannot form the basis of an application at all. Neither statement survives contact with the court's own case law — but the error is understandable, because the internal rules really do still say it:

Art. 216-D. A decisão estrangeira deverá: I - ter sido proferida por autoridade competente; II - conter elementos que comprovem terem sido as partes regularmente citadas ou ter sido legalmente verificada a revelia; III - ter transitado em julgado.

Article 216-D. The foreign decision must: I – have been rendered by a competent authority; II – contain elements demonstrating that the parties were regularly served or that default was legally established; III – have become final and unappealable.

Item III dates from 2014, one year before the current Code of Civil Procedure. The Code that followed dropped the requirement: article 963, III — quoted above — asks only that the decision be effective in the country where it was rendered. Confronted with the conflict, the STJ's Corte Especial — the panel of its fifteen most senior justices — resolved it in favour of the statute, first in SEC 14,812 (reported May 2018) and then squarely in HDE 818, the leading case:

O art. 963, III, do CPC/15, ao não mais exigir que a decisão judicial que se pretende homologar tenha transitado em julgado, mas apenas que seja eficaz no país em que foi proferida, torna possível a homologação de título judicial passível de ter seu cumprimento exigido no país de origem, não havendo necessidade de que tenha transitado em julgado.

Article 963, III of the 2015 CPC, by no longer requiring that the judicial decision submitted for homologation have become final and unappealable, but only that it be effective in the country where it was rendered, makes it possible to homologate a judicial title whose enforcement can be demanded in the country of origin — there being no need for it to have become res judicata.

That is item 3 of the ementa in HDE 818/EX, Corte Especial, reporting Justice Benedito Gonçalves, judged 4 September 2019 and reported 10 September 2019 — and it is not an isolated holding. The court repeated it in 2021 (AgInt na HDE 2,565: "final and unappealable status in the country of origin — a requirement that does not exist in the 2015 CPC"), and reaffirmed it as recently as 10 June 2025, in HDE 7,332/EX, whose headnote reads "TRÂNSITO EM JULGADO. REQUISITO INEXISTENTE NO CPC/2015. EFICÁCIA NO PAÍS DE ORIGEM. SUFICIÊNCIA" — finality: a requirement that does not exist; effectiveness in the country of origin: sufficient. All of these are public and searchable on the court's jurisprudence database.

Why this matters to you in practice: common-law judgments often circulate with a "final and non-appealable" certificate that takes months to obtain, default judgments may still be inside a theoretical reopening window, and some systems have no trânsito em julgado stamp at all. Under the standard the court actually applies, what you must show is that the judgment is enforceable where it was rendered — in one 2021 case the court accepted the court clerk's "filed" stamp as sufficient indication that the appeal window had lapsed. Three honest qualifications, so this is not read as broader than it is. Effectiveness still has to be proved, and the burden is real: in a 2024 case the Corte Especial homologated a foreign divorce judgment but refused the mediation minutes filed with it, precisely because the applicant had not shown the minutes were "effective in the country where rendered". If your judgment has become final, attach the proof anyway — it is the path of least friction, and it moots the argument. And the requirement the finality rule protected has not vanished: a decision that is suspended, stayed on appeal, or provisional in its own country is not "effective" and will not pass.

Who actually decides — and why the consensual route is fast

The single most useful structural fact about this procedure appears on none of the eleven pages we read: who decides depends on whether anyone objects, and the difference is not a nuance — it is the difference between one judge and fifteen.

Art. 216-A. É atribuição do Presidente do Tribunal homologar decisão estrangeira, ressalvado o disposto no art. 216-K.

Article 216-A. It is the attribution of the President of the Court to homologate a foreign decision, save as provided in article 216-K.

The default judge of your case is the President of the STJ, acting alone. The reservation — article 216-K — is triggered by contestation: if the respondent contests, the case is distributed to the Corte Especial, the court's fifteen-member senior panel, with a reporting justice, briefing rounds (reply and rejoinder in five days each, article 216-J) and a collegiate judgment. Everything about the timeline flows from which of those two tracks you are on, which is why the practical advice writes itself: if the other party will consent, get that consent in writing and file it with the petition. With all interested parties consenting, there is no one to summon and nothing to distribute — the file goes from the Presidency to a decision. In the sample of the court's output we measured below, every one of the twenty homologations published in a nine-day window in August 2026 was a monocratic decision of the President.

The rest of the cast, in the order you will meet them. The respondent, once summoned, has fifteen days to contest (article 216-H) — and the sole paragraph of that article confines the defence to the intelligibility of the foreign decision and the checklist requirements of articles 216-C, 216-D and 216-F; the merits are off the table, which is why most contests fail. A respondent who is in default or incapable receives a court-appointed special guardian (article 216-I) — in the case we measured, the federal Public Defender's Office — which then participates fully, and which is one of the quiet reasons a non-consensual case takes longer. The Federal Prosecution Service reviews every case:

Art. 216-L. O Ministério Público terá vista dos autos pelo prazo de quinze dias, podendo impugnar o pedido.

Article 216-L. The Public Prosecution Service shall have access to the case file for a period of fifteen days and may challenge the request.

Fifteen days, in the wording Regimental Amendment 24/2016 gave the article. One prominent competitor also asserts the "mandatory involvement of the Attorney-General's Office (AGU) […] in every proceeding"; it is not so — the AGU represents the federal government, which is a stranger to a private homologation, and the institutional reviewer the rules actually name is the prosecution service, in the article just quoted. Beyond that: partial homologation is expressly possible (article 216-A, paragraph 2, mirrored in article 961, paragraph 2 of the Code) — the court can recognise the divorce and refuse the property clause, or recognise the debt and sever a component that offends public policy. Provisional relief is available inside the procedure itself (article 216-G: "tutela provisória" — useful when something must be preserved in Brazil while the homologation runs). And decisions of the President or the reporting justice are reviewable by internal appeal (agravo, article 216-M) — which cuts both ways: a refusal can be challenged, and a grant can be, too.

How long it really takes — measured on the court's own docket, not estimated

The timelines published in English for this procedure are remarkable mainly for contradicting each other: the three most visible guides say "4 to 8 months", "around 6 to 18 months" and "6 months to 2 years" — none citing a source. The court's docket is public, so instead of adding a fifth opinion we measured it. Method, so you can repeat it: we took the homologation decisions published in the national judicial gazette (DJEN) between 12 and 20 August 2026 — twenty decisions, all monocratic grants by the President — and looked up the filing date of each case on the STJ's public docket. Eleven of the twenty had been filed in 2026; eight in 2025; one in 2024. Five cases, with their public docket numbers, tell the story:

Measured duration, filing to homologation decision (STJ public records, August 2026)

Case	Filed	Decision published	Duration	Situation
HDE 14,547 (Swiss divorce)	18 Jun 2026	18 Aug 2026	2 months	Consensual; certificate for registration already in preparation the next day
HDE 14,223 (Italian divorce)	8 May 2026	20 Aug 2026	3.4 months	Consensual, with a fee waiver
HDE 14,086 (Swiss divorce)	17 Apr 2026	20 Aug 2026	4 months	Respondent's consent on file
HDE 13,831 (Colombian divorce)	9 Mar 2026	12 Aug 2026	5 months	Respondent's consent on file
HDE 12,842 (Swiss divorce)	16 Sep 2025	18 Aug 2026	11 months	Respondent absent — special guardian appointed

And the contested benchmark comes from the court itself: in HDE 7,231 — a litigated divorce and property case decided by the Corte Especial — the ementa records both dates: "request filed on 16 August 2022, file ready for judgment on 19 April 2024", with judgment on 4 September 2024. Call it two years, door to door.

Read the table's right-hand column before its middle ones, because that is the finding: the timeline is not a property of the court — it is a property of your case's posture. With every interested party consenting in the initial filing, the measured range was two to five months. Where the respondent had to be reached and a special guardian stepped in, eleven. Where the case was fought, about twenty-five. The guides' divergent numbers are all "true" of some case and useless as a planning figure, because the variable that drives them is the one they never name. Two disclaimers we owe you: five cases are an illustration, not a statistical universe — though the twenty-decision sample behind them points the same way — and a measured past is not a promised future; your case's duration will depend on its own posture and completeness. That is exactly why we show the method: the docket is public, and you can measure it yourself the day you file.

What it costs — the fee that is fixed, and the two that are not

The court's own filing fee is the smallest number in the file and the only fixed one: for an HDE it is R$ 270.12 on the court's fee table in force since 2 February 2026, paid through the court's payment portal — the table adjusts annually, so check the current year's. The costs that actually size the project are the variable ones. Sworn translation of the judgment and its supporting documents is charged per page in Brazil, and a long foreign judgment is the typical cost driver of the whole file. Attorney's fees are between you and counsel; what the statute adds is that in a contested case the loser generally also pays court-awarded fees to the winner's counsel — and in homologation cases the Corte Especial has applied article 85, paragraph 8 of the Code, which lets the court set those fees equitably where the case has no measurable economic value of its own. One more data point from the measured sample above: fee waivers (justiça gratuita) are granted in HDE cases where the applicant qualifies — one of the five cases in our table ran on one.

Documents from abroad: the chain that feeds the petition

Article 216-C tells you what must accompany the petition: the original or certified copy of the foreign decision and any indispensable supporting documents, translated by an official or sworn translator in Brazil, and bearing consular legalisation "where applicable". That last qualifier has a modern answer: since Brazil joined the Hague Apostille Convention — promulgated by Decree 8,660/2016 — an apostille from a member state replaces consular legalisation, and the STJ has said so expressly, holding in a 2020 Corte Especial case that an apostilled foreign award needed no consular authentication at all, the Convention's broad definition of "public document" covering it. Documents from the few states outside the Convention still take the consular route.

Practical content of the bundle, beyond the judgment itself: proof of the judgment's effectiveness in its country of origin (or its finality, if you have it — see the finality section above), proof of service in the original case or of legally established default, and the parties' identification. The judgment must arrive whole — a decision quoted in extracts, or a settlement annex the foreign court never turned into an enforceable order, is where petitions stumble; the 2024 mediation-minutes refusal above is the cautionary case. The translation must be by a translator enrolled in Brazil — a certified translation from your own country does not satisfy article 216-C, a point that surprises almost everyone and wastes a round trip. For how a foreign power of attorney becomes usable in Brazil — apostille, sworn translation and registration at the Registry of Titles and Deeds, plus the three routes to signing one without travelling — we wrote the chain out link by link in hiring a Brazilian lawyer from abroad and inheritance in Brazil as a foreign heir; everything there applies here unchanged.

After homologation: the certificate, the registry, and the federal court

Homologation makes the foreign judgment effective in Brazil. It does not, by itself, move money or rewrite a registry entry. What happens next depends on what the judgment needs, and the rules split it cleanly in two.

For civil-status effects — a divorce to be annotated on a Brazilian marriage record, an adoption to be entered, a name change to be carried through — the instrument is the carta de sentença, a certified set of the homologation records that the internal rules make the vehicle of execution:

Art. 216-N. A decisão estrangeira homologada será executada por carta de sentença no Juízo Federal competente.

Article 216-N. The homologated foreign decision shall be executed by certificate of judgment before the competent Federal Court.

In the measured sample above, the court's registry was preparing the certificate for the two-month Swiss case the day after the decision — the administrative tail is short. For registry acts the certificate is presented to the civil registry that holds the record; for anything that must be coerced out of a debtor, the certificate instructs an enforcement case, and that case does not run at the STJ. The Code assigns it:

Art. 965. O cumprimento de decisão estrangeira far-se-á perante o juízo federal competente, a requerimento da parte, conforme as normas estabelecidas para o cumprimento de decisão nacional. Parágrafo único. O pedido de execução deverá ser instruído com cópia autenticada da decisão homologatória ou do exequatur, conforme o caso.

Article 965. Enforcement of a foreign decision shall take place before the competent federal court, at the party's request, under the rules established for the enforcement of a national decision. Sole paragraph. The enforcement request must be accompanied by a certified copy of the homologation decision or of the exequatur, as the case may be.

Three consequences worth planning around. The enforcement forum is federal even though the underlying claim is private — you will be enforcing in the federal court with territorial competence over the debtor or the assets, under the same rules as a domestic judgment, with the same tools (asset searches, account freezes, liens) and the same defence opportunities for the debtor. The homologated judgment is now a Brazilian enforceable title, so the enforcement phase is ordinary Brazilian debt collection — its speed depends on finding assets, not on the judgment's foreign origin. And the sequencing means your budget and calendar should treat recognition and enforcement as two proceedings, not one: the guides that quote a single all-in timeline are averaging over that boundary.

Where these cases actually fail

1. The consent that was never collected. The single largest controllable variable. A respondent who would happily have signed a consent is instead summoned — sometimes abroad, sometimes by rogatory letter, occasionally ending in a special guardian — and the two-month case becomes an eleven-month case. If relations allow it, obtain the written consent before filing.

2. The annex that is not a judgment. Settlement agreements, mediation minutes, notarised arrangements — documents that travel alongside a foreign judgment but were never made enforceable orders in their own country. The court homologates decisions that are effective where rendered; in the 2024 case above it recognised the divorce and refused the mediation minutes on exactly that ground. Have the foreign court incorporate the settlement into an order first.

3. The translation done in the wrong country. Article 216-C wants a sworn translator enrolled in Brazil. A certified translation from your home jurisdiction, however good, does not qualify — and the file waits while the work is redone.

4. Chasing a finality certificate the law does not require — or skipping the effectiveness proof it does. Both directions of the same error. Months are spent obtaining a "final and non-appealable" certification that article 963, III no longer demands; or, the mirror image, a petition arrives with no proof at all that the judgment is operative at home, and fails a requirement that very much still exists.

5. Treating homologation as the finish line. The money case that stalls after the STJ because nobody planned the federal enforcement phase, located assets, or budgeted for it. Recognition without an enforcement plan is a certificate in a drawer.

How the firm handles these files

Carvalho Barros Advocacia Internacional is a Brazilian practice working with clients in more than 30 countries, in matters that combine private international law with Brazilian procedure and taxation. In a recognition case our sequence follows the structure of this article: first whether the STJ is needed at all, then the posture — because obtaining a written consent before filing is worth more than any drafting flourish afterwards — then the document chain, run in parallel rather than in series, and only then the petition, drafted with the enforcement or registry phase already in view. Written communication with the firm is in English; meetings are conducted with an interpreter at no cost to the client. You can verify the author's registration with the Brazilian bar yourself — the method is described in our article on hiring a Brazilian lawyer from abroad.

None of the above asks you to take our word for anything. Every load-bearing statement names the provision or the public case it rests on, the provisions are linked to official texts, the case law is searchable on the STJ's public database, and the timeline table carries its method so you can reproduce it. That is also how you should read the next page you find on this subject — including the ones this article corrects.

Frequently asked questions

About the author

Luiz Alberto de Carvalho Barros Filho

Attorney at Law — Brazilian Bar (OAB/AL 7.530)

Brazilian attorney dedicated to private international law and cross-border taxation. Published author in the International Law Deskbook 2.0 (The Florida Bar) and contributor to the International Law Quarterly, also of The Florida Bar.

More about the firm

This article states the law of Brazil as reviewed on 25 August 2026. Sources are cited in the text and linked to official publications: the Code of Civil Procedure (Law No. 13,105/2015, articles 960 to 965), the Internal Rules of the Superior Tribunal de Justiça in the consolidated text published by the court's digital library (articles 216-A to 216-N), the LINDB (Decree-Law No. 4,657/1942, article 17), the Constitution (article 105, I, i), Decree No. 8,660/2016 and the Arbitration Act (Law No. 9,307/1996, article 35). Case law cited — SEC 14,812, HDE 818, HDE 1,940, AgInt na HDE 2,565, HDE 7,231 and HDE 7,332 — is from the STJ's Corte Especial and searchable on the court's public database. Where a provision is quoted, the Portuguese original is reproduced first, followed by the author's working translation; the Portuguese text is the only authoritative version. Stated limits of this article. The timeline table reports the observed duration of identified public cases decided in August 2026 and the method used to find them; it is a documented observation, not a statistical study and not an estimate for any future case, whose duration depends on its own posture and completeness. The filing-fee figure is the 2026 value and adjusts annually. The registry-level steps that follow a consensual foreign divorce are governed by the National Council of Justice's registry rules and are covered in the firm's Portuguese-language article on this subject, of which this article is the English-language counterpart. The statements about English-language search results reflect the firm's own documented review of eleven leading results on this subject, conducted in August 2026. No promise of results is made (Brazilian Bar Provision OAB No. 205/2021). To review your specific case, contact attorney Luiz Barros — Brazilian Bar, OAB/AL 7.530.