Recommendation for ensuring legally significant trusted transboundary electronic interaction

A rapid development of information technologies has given rise to their application practically in all spheres of society’s life. Mobile communications ensures an easy connection to the Internet network and information exchange regardless of time and geography. It can be stated that information accessibility is ensured, but the same cannot be said about legal validity.

Ensuring legal significance of electronic interaction is a complex problem and includes legal, organizational and technical aspects, whose solution is subject to both other UN/CEFACT recommendations and cooperation with the UNCITRAL and various standardization organizations.

Specific requirements for ensuring validity of electronic data and legal significance of electronic interaction vary from industry to industry and from country to country, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The result is an increasingly fragmented landscape of unconnected infrastructures and systems that impact the reliability, traceability and integrity of electronic data transfer when exchanging electronic data. In effect creating "islands of trust" in a sea of uncertainty.

The purposes of this project are:

    to formulate basic principles and prepare a recommendation on establishing coordinating infrastructures for enabling legal significance of transboundary electronic interaction in trade scenarios;

    to study infrastructures for transboundary electronic interaction in trade scenarios in view of identifying the UNECE recommendations package on the subject.