Originally from Chamber of Arbitration of Milan Rules: A Commentary

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ARTICLE 5 – LANGUAGE OF THE ARBITRATION

1. The language of the arbitration shall be agreed upon the parties in their arbitration agreement or subsequently until the Arbitral Tribunal is constituted.

2. In the absence of any agreement by the parties, the Arbitral Tribunal shall determine the language of the arbitration.

3. The Arbitral Tribunal may accept the submission of documents in a language other than the language of the arbitration and may order them to be accompanied by a translation into the language of the arbitration.

1. The consistency with the civil procedure rules and the influence of the Italian reforms of arbitration.

1.1. The present text of this provision is a slightly different version of the former article 5 of the International Arbitration Rules of 2004, which had marked a clear departure from the structure and contents of the previous article 12 of the International Arbitration Rules of 1996. A philological approach suggests to underline that paragraph 1 remained unaltered, while, unlike the 2004 version, the sentence “The Secretariat shall indicate the language of acts precedent to that determination” at the end of paragraph 2 has now been deleted. Eventually, paragraph 3 concerning the prerogatives of the Arbitral Tribunal as to the language of the documents submitted, has changed the formula according to which the Tribunal might have ordered that they “be translated into the language of the arbitration”.

The above changes substantially amount to a restyling of a text that has been traditionally aimed at combining the flexible character of civil and commercial arbitration with the freedom of choice to be granted to the parties, with the need of ensuring clear and certain procedural rules for both the parties and the arbitration tribunal.