The ICCS-CIEC Data Exchange Platform

The Customer

International Commission on Civil Status (French: Commission Internationale de l’État Civil), hereinafter referred to as “ICCS-CIEC”, is an International intergovernmental organization that operates towards the European integration. ICCS-CIEC currently regroups fifteen (15) member States and seven (7) observer States. According to its rules, the ICCS-CIEC aims to facilitate international co-operation in civil-status matters and to further enable the exchange of information between civil registrars. The ICCS-CIEC carries out studies and draws up recommendations or conventions, aimed at harmonizing the law of the member States relating to the status and capacity of persons, to the family and to nationality and at improving the operation of civil-status departments in those States. The ICCS-CIEC compiles and keeps up to date documentation on legislation and case-law setting out the law of the member States on these matters.

Over the last 60 years, the ICCS-CIEC has drawn up 32 Conventions relating to civil-status matters. One of these (Convention on international communication by electronic means, signed at Athens on 17 September 2001) sets up a legal basis for the exchange via IT tools of civil-status data as foreseen in other Conventions. The Athens Convention, which has been signed by six States could not yet be ratified because no appropriate electronic tool existed to implement it and enable electronic means to be used for communications between civil-status authorities.

In this context, the overall objective of the project was to realize the software platform and to set up the technical means for the international exchange of civil-status data and documents by electronic means between civil registrars of the various member states.

The Challenge

ICCS – CIEC seeks for a software infrastructure that will materialize its convention for the international, secure and electronic exchange of civil-status data, requests and documents between civil registrars of the different countries.

ICCS – CIEC seeks for a holistic software solution that will comprise an integrated environment built upon a set of modules in order to facilitate the homogenized user interaction based on a single environment.

ICCS – CIEC needs to adhere to very high security standards for the generation and transmission of highly sensitive personal data taking under consideration that the transmission channel is going to be the Internet, a totally hostile environment for sensitive data.

ICCS-CIEC requires a software solution that will incorporate a set of assistive tools that will allow for the continuous platform parameterization and fine-tuning considering the constantly changing administrative structures of the countries – member states.

Our Solution

In order to come up with the above-mentioned set of challenges posed by the nature of ICCS-CIEC, UBITECH installed and performed a highly-customized instance of ubi:eXchange software platform.

UBITECH instantiated, parameterized and implemented the required software interfaces required in order to allow the interoperation of ubi:eXchange PKI infrastructure with the ones already existing in the various member states.

ubi:eXchange digital document signing and encryption environment is on-the-fly installed in the personal PC of each Civil Registrar in a secure environment in order to maintain all the security constraints imposed by the organizational security policies.

ubi:eXchange security mechanism was customized and bundled with the asymmetric encryption component so that to ensure the secure and intact transmission of the sensitive personal data of the Citizen through the totally unsecure environment of Internet.

ubi:eXchange multilingual features both of the assistive tools as well as of the integrated document exchange environment provide the means for a fully localized end-user experience ameliorating the utilization of the platform.

The Benefits

The fully – customized deployment of ubi:eXchange software platform offered a set of highly valued benefits to ICCS – CIEC:

  • Promotion of cross-border electronic exchange of civil-status data and documents, with standardized application forms and documents;
  • Highly – secure cooperation between authorities, thus accelerating and facilitating information exchanges, procedures and free movement of citizens, and preventing any fraudulent interchange of life events data;
  • Provision of a highly – automated procedure for the request and acquisition of civil status certificates on a remote basis; and
  • Tailor – made user experience based on the automation, as well as the multilingualism features enclosed in ubi:eXchange platform.