The 54th session of UNCITRAL Working Group IV on Electronic Commerce brought to a close work on the regulation of “Electronic Transferable Records”, following which a new Working Group on Identity Management was formed.
During the last session in Vienna, Working Group IV on Electronic Commerce of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) produced a final version of the International Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records and invited the UNCITRAL Secretariat to forward the text to all Member States and international organisations for their opinions, after which the text will then be submitted to the UNCITRAL Commission in Vienna in July 2017.
Over the last five years the Working Group’s activity focused on the definition, the rules and the use of these particular electronic financial data. As its President, Giusella Finocchiaro chaired the Working Group from 2012 until the termination of its work.
In its activity concerning ETRs, the Working Group drew inspiration from a number of fundamental principles such as those of technology neutrality and of non-discrimination between paper and electronic documents, keeping the impact on national substantive legislation to a minimum.
At the same time as they brought to an end their analysis of Electronic Transferable Records, the Working Group initiated a discussion on the new Identity Management project assigned by the Commission, which is currently an issue of significant national and international interest.
The new Working Group will be required to focus both on Digital Identification systems with a diversity of subjects and on bilateral systems and will have to take into consideration the identities of both natural persons and legal persons, without at the moment excluding digital objects. There was a reminder that the Commission’s mandate also concerns “Trust Services” the detailed study of which will be made in the future, but which will immediately be taken into consideration working out their definitions.
Therefore a group of experts has been created for the elaboration of first drafts. Given that the European Regulation on this subject has recently come into force, the European approach, which the Commission strongly supports, will be most significant.
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