International Trade Lawmaking @ Beijing Normal University

At its forty-eighth session (2015) the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) requested its Secretariat to convene a colloquium on legal issues related to identity management and trust services with a view to compiling information on the scope and methodology of future work in that area (see Official Records of the General Assembly, Seventieth Session, Supplement No. 17 (A/70/17), para. 358). In line with that request, UNCITRAL Electronic Commerce Working Group organized the Colloquium on ID Management and Trust Services on April 21 and 22, 2016 at the Vienna International Centre. The Program and conference materials are available on the UNCITRAL website.

Prof. Xue, as the second speaker of the first Session of the Colloquium, gave a comprehensive presentation on “Scoping Cross-Border e-ID Management and Facilitating International e-Trade”. Prof. Xue pointed out the key legal issues with respect to the eID management and the possible legal framework or solution to address these issues. The new theoretical analysis and framing provided by Prof. Xue were warmly haled as the creative and innovative research that opens up a new legal dimension by the legal professions at the conference. Prof. Xue specifically addressed the open “federal” approach for eID management and the important role of trust service and creatively adopted the three-tier analytical benchmarks for eID law and scoping, i.e. principal IDs, derivative IDs and alternative IDs.

The Colloquium is very informative and invited the representatives of almost all the existing eID management laws and practices, including Estonia, US Virginia, Russia, Peru and China.

Through the discussions at the Colloquium, the UNCITRAL will officially launch the new project on eID management and trust service in the auspices of the Electronic Commerce Working Group, which is expected to conclude its work on the drafting of the Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records.