Offering e-government services online can present important legal questions about the validity of electronic documents and separate, complex issues concerning identification and authentication. Traditional government functions have relied on paper-based transactions. In order to introduce online transactions, governments must consider whether their laws recognize the validity of electronic documents.


As a starting point, laws specifying that certain information must be submitted “in writing” may have to be amended to make it clear that an electronic submission is legally valid. The Model Law on Electronic Commerce developed in 1996 by the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) recommends legislative language to make it clear that a document cannot be denied legal effect as a writing or as an original solely because it is in electronic form. If there is any doubt about the legal validity of electronic submissions, this is a baseline reform.

More complex questions are presented by requirements that documents be “signed.” In a number of countries, policy-makers seeking to create an environment of trust for both e-commerce and e-Government have adopted electronic signature legislation in order to provide legal certainty to electronic signature techniques as a substitute for handwritten signatures and other traditional procedures. The most common model for such legislation is the 2001 UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures. In the same vein, in 1999 the European Union adopted a directive setting out a community framework for electronic signatures (the E-Signature Directive).


Authentication is the process of confirming someone’s identity. In some (but not all) e-Government transactions, especially where personal or financial information is being exchanged, it is necessary to authenticate, or validate, the identity of the user. There are a variety of mans to do so, ranging from user name and password to cryptographically based “digital signatures.”

It is important to recognize that the US, UK, New Zealand and other developed countries have adopted an incremental approach to authentication issues, an approach that also might be well-suited for emerging economies. This incremental approach emphasizes, first, making any legal changes necessary to ensure that there is no legal bar to the acceptance of electronic documents and, second, adopting a sliding scale of different authentication means suited to the nature of different transactions. Under this incremental approach, launch of e-Government, even in the Transact phase, can proceed quite far without establishing elaborate authentication technologies.

A Note of Caution on PKI

Identity and Authentication Case Study – New Zealand

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