The French Senate has now authorised the ratification of the London Agreement, which will significantly reduce the translation requirements, in many countries, at the post grant stage of European Patents. The next step is for France to ratify the Agreement and it will then come into force for those countries who are parties to the Agreement. Currently these are Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Monaco, Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and the Danish and Swedish parliaments have taken the necessary steps to ratify, although they have not yet deposited their instruments of ratification.
Parties to the Agreement undertake to waive entirely or largely, the requirement for translations of European Patents to be filed in their national language. In practice, translations of the specifications will no longer be required for countries which are parties to the London Agreement and have one of the three EPO languages as an official language, e.g. Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, UK and Ireland. For the other countries, an official language will be nominated and translation will only be required if the specification is not in that nominated language.
When we have more details of the timing, we will let you know.
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