THE RATIO. One judgment, decoded twice: once for anyone, once for the profession.

Case Details

  • Citation: Devas Multimedia Private Ltd. v. Antrix Corp. Ltd., Nos. 20-36024, 22-35085, 22-35103 (9th Cir. Aug. 12, 2026)
  • Court and Panel: United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, before Circuit Judges Eric D. Miller and Lucy H. Koh and District Judge Donald W. Molloy (D. Mont., sitting by designation), opinion by Judge Koh
  • Decided: 12 August 2026 (argued and submitted 10 March 2026, San Francisco); on appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington (Judge Thomas S. Zilly), following remand from the Supreme Court in CC/Devas (Mauritius) Ltd. v. Antrix Corp., 605 U.S. 223 (2025)
  • Parties: Devas Multimedia Private Limited, together with four intervenors, three Mauritian shareholder entities and Devas Multimedia America, Inc. (Petitioner-Appellee and Appellees-Intervenors), against Antrix Corp. Ltd, wholly owned by the Republic of India (Respondent-Appellant)
  • Governing provisions: Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C. sections 1330, 1603, 1605(a)(6), 1609, and 1610; the New York Convention and its implementing legislation at 9 U.S.C. sections 201 to 208; the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause
  • Counsel: Christopher E. Tutunjian and Aaron M. Streett of Baker Botts LLP for Devas; counsel from King & Spalding, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, and McNaul Ebel Nawrot & Helgren for the Intervenors; Amanda S. Berman and counsel from Crowell & Moring, Curtis Mallet-Prevost Colt & Mosle, and Sidley Austin for Antrix
  • Key precedents applied: CC/Devas (Mauritius) Ltd. v. Antrix Corp., 605 U.S. 223 (2025); Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization, 606 U.S. 1 (2025); Hosaka v. United Airlines, Inc., 305 F.3d 989 (9th Cir. 2002); Verlinden B.V. v. Central Bank of Nigeria, 461 U.S. 480 (1983)
  • Key sections: Part III.A (subject matter jurisdiction under the FSIA’s arbitration exception); Part III.B (personal jurisdiction under the Fifth Amendment, applying Fuld); Part III.C (forum non conveniens); Part IV (disposition)

Headnote

An Indian satellite company and an arm of India’s government owned space agency fought for two decades over a cancelled satellite deal, a fight that produced a $562.5 million arbitration award, years of American court battles to collect on it, and a trip to the United States Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit, deciding the case for a second time after the Supreme Court corrected its earlier approach, held that American courts can confirm and enforce the award even though the underlying dispute has no real connection to the United States beyond the fact that the Indian government company happens to hold assets here. It also broke new ground for the circuit by ruling that a court cannot dismiss an award confirmation case simply because a foreign court would be a more convenient place to litigate. The company resisting the award is left owing the debt in the United States for now, though the practical effect of a later Indian court ruling that threw out the award altogether still has to be worked out by the trial court.

Factual Background

In January 2005, Antrix Corp Ltd, the commercial arm of India’s Department of Space and its space agency ISRO, agreed to build and launch two satellites for Devas Multimedia Private Limited, an Indian company, and to lease Devas a slice of India’s S-band radio spectrum so Devas could offer satellite based communications services. Six years later, in February 2011, Antrix told Devas it was cancelling the deal, citing a decision by the Indian government that the spectrum was needed for other purposes. Devas disputed that the cancellation was valid and, under the agreement’s arbitration clause, brought the dispute before a three member tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce, seated in New Delhi.

In September 2015, the tribunal ruled unanimously that Antrix had wrongfully broken the contract and awarded Devas $562.5 million in damages, a sum that has continued to grow with accrued interest and was reported at more than two billion dollars by the time of this ruling. Devas, joined by several of its overseas shareholders and by a related American entity, went to federal court in Seattle in 2018 to have that award confirmed and turned into an enforceable American judgment, a step available under the New York Convention, the treaty under which signatory countries agree to recognise and enforce each other’s arbitration awards. While that Seattle case worked through the American courts, Indian courts took a very different view of the underlying dispute. Antrix persuaded India’s company law tribunal that Devas had been formed and operated fraudulently, leading to Devas being wound up, a finding upheld all the way to India’s Supreme Court in January 2022. Building on that fraud finding, the Delhi High Court set aside the arbitral award itself in August 2022, a decision a Division Bench of that court affirmed in March 2023.

In the American proceedings, the district court confirmed the award and entered judgment, rejecting Antrix’s objections to jurisdiction and to the choice of forum. Antrix appealed. On its first pass at the case, in 2023, the Ninth Circuit sided with Antrix on a narrower ground, holding that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act required a showing that Antrix had traditional minimum contacts with the United States, contacts the panel found Devas had not shown, and reversed on that basis without reaching Antrix’s other arguments. The Supreme Court took up the case and, in June 2025, unanimously reversed, holding that the Act imposes no minimum contacts requirement beyond what its own listed exceptions already demand, and sent the case back for the Ninth Circuit to resolve the questions it had not needed to answer the first time.

The Question for Determination

In plain terms: after the Supreme Court told the Ninth Circuit to go back and answer the questions it had skipped over, three separate questions remained. Do American courts even have the power to hear a case about an arbitration award between two Indian companies over a wholly Indian dispute? If so, is it fair, under the US Constitution, to bring an Indian government company into an American courtroom over that dispute? And even if all of that is fine, should an American judge nonetheless send the whole case to India instead, since that is where everything actually happened?

Framed precisely, the Ninth Circuit had to decide, first, whether the FSIA’s arbitration exception to sovereign immunity requires the underlying arbitration agreement to have some commercial connection to the United States, or is satisfied whenever the award falls under the New York Convention regardless of where the underlying commerce occurred; second, whether exercising personal jurisdiction over Antrix is reasonable and therefore consistent with the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, applying the framework the Supreme Court had just set out in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization; and third, whether the doctrine of forum non conveniens can be used to dismiss an action to confirm a foreign arbitral award under the New York Convention, a question of first impression in the circuit.

The Court’s Reasoning

On subject matter jurisdiction, the court started with the text of the FSIA’s arbitration exception, which strips immunity from suits to confirm an award made under an arbitration agreement that concerns a subject matter “capable of settlement by arbitration under the laws of the United States.” Antrix argued that a dispute over purely foreign commerce could never meet that description. The court disagreed, pointing out that a neighbouring FSIA exception, the commercial activity exception, expressly requires an action “based upon a commercial activity carried on in the United States,” while the arbitration exception contains no comparable language, a contrast the court treated as deliberate under the ordinary rule that Congress includes limits where it means to and omits them where it does not. The New York Convention supplied the missing link: because federal law deems any action under the Convention to arise under United States law, and the Convention independently requires the United States to enforce covered awards, an award covered by the Convention necessarily concerns a subject matter American law can settle by arbitration, regardless of where the underlying commerce took place. The court also rejected Antrix’s reliance on a Supreme Court passage requiring “substantial contact with the United States” for FSIA jurisdiction generally, explaining that the passage described how each of the FSIA’s specific exceptions already builds in its own contacts requirement, not a freestanding overlay the court could import into an exception that, like this one, does not contain one.

On personal jurisdiction, the court assumed without deciding that a state owned corporation like Antrix could even claim Fifth Amendment due process protection, and applied the reasonableness framework the Supreme Court had set out weeks earlier in Fuld v. Palestine Liberation Organization for foreign defendants brought into American courts under federal, rather than state, jurisdictional statutes. Weighing the United States’ interest as the forum, the burden on Antrix, and Devas’s interest in obtaining relief, the court found all three favoured jurisdiction: Congress and the executive had made a considered judgment to enforce American treaty obligations through the FSIA’s narrow, specific exceptions; Antrix, backed by the resources of the Indian government, faced no undue hardship litigating in the United States and did not argue otherwise; and Devas had nowhere else to go, since only an American court can attach a foreign state’s property located here. The court added that Antrix could claim no unfair surprise, given that India has been a signatory to the New York Convention for decades and Antrix itself had agreed that any award could be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

On forum non conveniens, a question the Ninth Circuit had never previously answered for New York Convention cases, the court held the doctrine has no application at all. The Convention makes recognition and enforcement of a covered award mandatory, subject only to a closed list of specific defences that does not include inconvenience of the forum, and letting a court add an unlisted defence would rewrite the treaty’s bargain. The court found its own precedent on a similar treaty, the Warsaw Convention governing international air carriage, directly supportive, since it had already held forum non conveniens incompatible with that treaty’s goal of uniform, predictable enforcement across signatory states, reasoning it found equally applicable to the New York Convention’s parallel purpose. A clause in the Convention permitting each country to apply its own procedural rules when enforcing an award, the court held, governs only the manner of enforcement, not whether to enforce at all, aligning itself with a dissenting Second Circuit judge’s reading of a similar clause over that circuit’s own majority approach to a related treaty.

Beyond the Convention’s text, the court found forum non conveniens structurally incompatible with what a confirmation action actually seeks: attachment of a foreign sovereign’s commercial property located in the United States, relief only an American court can grant, since foreign courts cannot reach assets sitting inside the United States. Because the doctrine requires an adequate alternative forum and no Indian court could give Devas what it was actually asking for, the premise for dismissal was missing regardless of any other consideration. The court noted, in the alternative, that even if the doctrine did apply, the district court had not abused its discretion in declining to dismiss, since India was not an adequate alternative forum on the same reasoning.

Having resolved all three questions against Antrix, the court affirmed the district court’s rulings on jurisdiction and forum. In a companion, unpublished disposition issued the same day, it also affirmed confirmation of the award and the registration of the resulting judgment against one of the American intervenors, but reversed and vacated, in part, the standing of the shareholder intervenors to register that judgment in their own right, and sent the case back to the district court to decide, in the first instance, what effect the Delhi High Court’s later decision setting the award aside should have on enforcement in the United States, a question the panel expressly left untouched.

Critical Assessment

The court’s reading of the FSIA’s arbitration exception is textually clean, but it produces a striking practical result: a dispute between two Indian companies, arbitrated in New Delhi under Indian procedure, with no American commercial connection at all, can nonetheless be litigated to judgment in a Seattle courtroom and enforced against a foreign government’s property found in the United States. The court is candid that this is exactly what the statute’s text permits, and its comparison to the commercial activity exception’s express nexus language is a genuinely strong textual argument. Still, the breadth of the holding means that any signatory state doing business anywhere in the world exposes its American assets to a New York Convention judgment the moment it arbitrates and loses, whatever the connection, or lack of one, to the United States, a consequence some foreign states will understandably find hard to square with sovereign immunity’s underlying premise.

The forum non conveniens holding is on firmer ground and is well reasoned on its own terms. Treating the doctrine as incompatible with a treaty that mandates enforcement subject only to an enumerated, closed list of defences respects the actual bargain the United States struck when it joined the Convention, rather than importing a common law doctrine the treaty’s drafters chose not to include. The court’s fallback point, that no foreign court can grant the specific relief a confirmation action seeks because only American courts can attach assets located here, is a clean, almost mechanical reason that does not depend on any contestable weighing of convenience at all, and it is difficult to see how the opposite rule could function in practice.

The Fifth Amendment ruling is the most tentative of the three, and the court is unusually candid about that. It assumes, without deciding, that a foreign state owned corporation is even a “person” entitled to due process protection, and it assumes, without deciding, that a reasonableness inquiry is constitutionally required at all, borrowing a three factor test the Supreme Court itself, in Fuld, declined to say was mandatory outside the specific terrorism statute context in which that case arose. Building a personal jurisdiction ruling on two unresolved assumptions is not a flaw unique to this panel, since the Supreme Court left those very questions open in Fuld, but it does mean the Fifth Amendment analysis here rests on ground the Supreme Court has not yet firmly set, a gap that will presumably need filling in some later case rather than this one.

Implications

If you’re not a lawyer: If a company or a government agency anywhere in the world loses an international arbitration case and has assets in the United States, this ruling confirms that the winning side can generally come to an American court to collect, even if the underlying dispute never touched the United States at all. It also means the losing side cannot simply argue that America is an inconvenient place to fight the case and expect that argument to succeed. For this specific dispute, that means Devas’s long running effort to collect on its arbitration award against an Indian government company can keep moving forward in the United States, though the final outcome may still turn on how an American court eventually treats an Indian court’s later decision throwing out the award altogether, a question that has not yet been answered.

For the profession: Practitioners representing award creditors now have strong circuit authority that neither a lack of United States commercial nexus nor forum non conveniens will derail a New York Convention confirmation action in the Ninth Circuit, and the court’s reasoning on the Convention’s closed list of defences should travel well to other circuits weighing the same question. Counsel for sovereign or state owned respondents should focus resistance elsewhere, for instance on the enumerated Convention defences themselves, or, as Antrix will now do before the district court, on the effect of a foreign set-aside judgment obtained after an American court has already confirmed the award, an issue this opinion pointedly left open and that is likely to be the more consequential battle going forward. The Fifth Amendment personal jurisdiction analysis rests on assumptions the Supreme Court has not resolved, and is better treated as unsettled ground than as a fully secured holding when advising clients.