Supreme Court of the Netherlands

• Existing identities from the agreement systems are used to access the digital portals of the judicial chain.
• No new identities (accounts) required to provide access.
• Enforcing two-factor authentication, which is already provided by the protocol frameworks themselves (trust levels) and does not need to be implemented additionally.

What was the project at the Supreme Court?

Following the broad project on Quality and Innovation (KEI) across the judiciary, the Council of State and the Supreme Court of the Netherlands complied with the Minister of Security and Justice’s request to make the judiciary digitally accessible. The Judicial Council, the Council of State, and the Supreme Court worked closely together on this. Within the concept of digitalization, a portal was created where litigants (and/or their legal representatives) could access the administrative case law of the Council of State and the cassation case law of the Supreme Court, respectively. Parties to the proceedings were required to use a digital portal to initiate proceedings, submit or receive documents, view (parts of) case files, track the status of their cases, etc. The digital portals of the Council of State and the Supreme Court were required to use the existing agreements systems eHerkenning, Advocatenpas, and DigiD to authenticate the portal users. A federation service based on Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services was provided, which was linked to the digital portals on the one hand and to the appointment systems on the other.

What were the challenges in implementing Trusted-ID solutions?
The incompatibility between Active Directory Federation Services, which uses the SAMLv2 SPLite and IDPLite profiles by default, and the eHerkenning, Advocatenpas, and DigiD protocol frameworks, which deviate slightly from the SAMLv2 standard (metadata), has been resolved by performing protocol translation (correction) between the protocol frameworks and Active Directory Federation Services.

What are the results?
Citizens, lawyers, and legal aid insurers, for example, can log in to the cassation law portal via Single Sign-On and handle proceedings online.