Title: IDENTITY LAW SURVEY

Identity Law Survey

The objective in the first workplan period of FIDIS, April 2004 – September 2005, was to develop a database for ID-related legislation that is simple and user-friendly, in order to provide the general public with basic information on ID-related laws in the EU.  

Such a database does not yet exist. On the contrary: there are some repositories of legislation, but these provide lists of laws, either laws in general – usually for a limited number of countries, or laws in specific areas, e.g., data-protection laws. However, there is no repository of ID-related laws on the web. Moreover, existing law databases typically provide legal texts, without comments or context, and they list entire laws where only one or two provisions may be relevant for the topic at hand. In contrast, the IDLS aims to provide added-value information on ID-related laws by selecting only those laws and legal provisions that are directly relevant for identity and identification, and by ‘translating’ the legal jargon into summaries in normal language understandable for interested lay-people. This gives the IDLS a unique position within the range of legal databases currently existing on the Internet.  

To show how the database works and its interest, a prototype was to be built into which a sample of laws could be input. The sample chosen was a) legislation on official ID documents, and b) ID theft-related laws, which were collected within the framework of FIDIS workpackage 5, which has focused on ID theft.  

Since it was known at the start that the United States have extensive specific legislation on ID theft, the starting point of the law survey was to incorporate not only European laws, but also the US legislation on ID theft and ID fraud into the prototype.