Electronic signatures

Computer lawyers have been struggling for at least two decades to devise a secure method of creating authentic signatures for electronic documents which are safe from forgery and which can individualise a document in the same way that an ink signature on a paper document can make of it a unique original. Such authentication is traditionally needed for court documentation, business transactions and, particularly seriously, for transferable instruments such as bills of lading and letters of credit. The EC's new directive "on a Community framework for electronic signatures", adopted on 13 December (Directive 1999/93- see OJ L13/12 of 19 January), is therefore of the greatest importance. Based on the concept of a "qualified certificate" issued by an accredited certification-service-provider, the legal nub of the directive requires acceptance in legal proceedings of "advanced electronic signatures which are based on a qualified certificate and which are created by a securesignature-creation device". The directive as a whole reads as an extremely pithy and clever concentrated condensation of massive legal and technical research. If ever an EC directive required the sort of extended and authentic expert commentary that each successive version of the Judgments Convention has received, this is it. The directive, even its preamble, is meaningless without an extensive knowledge of its scientific and legal background - which is all new stuff and requires its own study. And yet this is centre-court law and cannot be ignored. This is one of the most important legal documents that the Community has issued in recent years.