Abstract
The law on trust services for electronic transactions imposes several new obligations on public authorities (more precisely on public signatory). As of 19 September 2018, public signatories are obliged to sign and seal electronic documents exclusively by qualified electronic signature and qualified electronic seal.
This obligation applies to cases of legal action. Futhermore, the public signatories are obliged, when acting legally, to attach a qualified electronic time stamp to an electronically signed or sealed document as a means of proving the existence of electronic data at a certain point in time.
The article deals with the consequences of the public authorities' failure to fulfill these obligations.