Standards of Evidentiary Authority for the Electronic Documents (A Commentary on Updates to the Executive Regulation of the Egyptian Electronic Signature Law in Light of the Decisions of the Court of Cassation)

The Minister of Communications and Information Technology issued Decision No. 361 of 2020, including the amendments to the original executive regulations of Law No. 15 of 2004 regarding the regulation of electronic signature. The amendments addressed several sectors of the original executive regulation, which included, on the one hand, the definition section, and on the other hand, a number of technical and technological standards, which together constitute conditions for the electronic signature, writing, and electronic documents to acquire evidentiary authority.
The research reveals that the new regulations take into consideration, when drafting its new or amended provisions of the previous regulations, the needs that are revealed by the practical application of the system for creating electronic signature data and its connection with the documents placed on it, in the light of the developments that occurred to the electronic data editing systems.
The question arises as to how the courts, when dealing with disputes, take in consideration the technical data on which the general provisions of the law are based, and in particular determining upon whom the burden of proving the availability of technical standards requirements falls as of proving the availability of technical standards requirements as detailed in the executive regulations. This was what the Court of Cassation was able to overcome, by deciding a numbers of legal principles the most important of which is that when the technical conditions and standards are met, it is enough to whoever adheres to email messages to provide the material evidence for them represented in their paper extract.