Scroll
Electronic Signatures
On 3 May 2023, Dispatch No 5108/2023 on the issue of qualified certificates of electronic signature where the natural person holding the certificate represents a legal person was published in Diário da República.
By means of this Order, the National Security Office, within the scope of the powers provided for in Article 6 of Decree-Law No 12/2021 of 9 February 2022, established the standard rules for all information to be included in the digital certificates qualified for representation in order to facilitate its interpretation.
Furthermore, it has clarified in what ways these qualified digital certificates should be issued by Trust Services Qualified Providers, since this was already possible, by Article 3(2)(a) of Decree-Law No 12/2021 of 9 February, recommending that:
"The affixing of a qualified electronic signature to an electronic document shall be equivalent to the signature of documents with written form on paper media and shall create the presumption that the person who has submitted the qualified electronic signature is the holder of the electronic signature or is a representative, with sufficient powers, of the legal person concerned."
First, Order No 5108/2023 established that digital representation certificates can only be issued – by a Qualified Trust Service Provider –the legal representative who has sufficient powers to alone, enforce and bind the legal person concerned.
To this end, the Qualified Trust Service Provider should ensure that the applicant for the qualified certificate concerned has the right of representation in relation to the legal person to be represented. In this context, when issuing the qualified digital certificate, the Qualified Confidence Service Provider should clearly ensure the information contained in the documents that served as legal support for the issue of the qualified certificate concerned, in particular the information relating to the legal representation powers of the holder of the qualified digital certificate.
However, as can be concluded, this Order states that these certificates are appropriate for identifying a legal representative of an organisation, enabling its users to be unnecessarily required to submit documents proving the alleged representative powers.
It should be noted that when a natural person signs a particular electronic document by means of a qualified representation certificate, no additional documents need be submitted to prove the person’s representation and binding powers in relation to a given entity, as it is based on the assumption that the Qualified Trust Services Provider has carried out such validation in time prior to the issue of the certificate.
DigitalSign, as Qualified Trust Services Provider, under Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 July, commonly referred to as the EIDAS Regulation, provides digital representation certificates as defined by Decision No 5108/2023.
