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The Czech Republic has been the first European Union Member State to notify to the European Commission its Trusted List of supervised/accredited certification service providers (CSPs) issuing qualified certificates to the public.
This list will allow the receiving parties from the other EU Member States to verify that the certificate issued in the Czech Republic as a qualified certificate is indeed a qualified certificate in the meaning of the European Parliament and Council Directive 1999/93/EC on a Community framework for electronic signatures.
The Czech Republic thus fulfilled an obligation laid down in the European Commission decision 2009/767/EC of 16 October 2009 setting out measures facilitating the use of procedures by electronic means through the 'points of single contact' under the Services Directive.
Indeed, one of the measures adopted by the Decision consists in the obligation for Member States to establish and publish their Trusted List of supervised/accredited certification service providers issuing qualified certificates to the public.
The objective of this obligation is to enhance the cross-border use of electronic signatures by increasing trust in electronic signatures originating from other Member States.
The EU Member States had to comply with this obligation by establishing and publishing the list in a "human readable" form by 28 December 2009. They are free to produce also a "machine processable" form which would allow automated information retrieval.
The Trusted Lists have to be made available by all Member States, including those who have no certification service providers issuing qualified certificates; the fact that a national Trusted List is empty will then indicate the absence of certification service providers issuing qualified certificates.
In order to allow access to the trusted lists of all Member States in an easy manner, the European Commission has published a central list with links to national "trusted lists". This central list has been created by the Directorate General for Informatics under the IDABC programme (now the ISA programme), in close collaboration with Directorates-General Internal Market and Services and Information Society and Media.
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