The Council of State

• 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 Council of State?

Following the broad project on Quality and Innovation (KEI) in the field of jurisprudence, the Council of State and the Supreme Court of the Netherlands followed the request of the Minister of Security and Justice to make the judiciary digitally accessible. The Judicial Council, the Council of State and the Supreme Court worked closely together on this matter. Within the concept of digitalization, a portal was provided where litigants (and/or their legal representatives) have access to the administrative jurisdiction of the Council of State and the cassation jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. This required parties to the proceedings to use a digital portal to initiate proceedings, submit or receive documents, view (parts of) files, track the status of their case, etc. The digital portals of the Council of State and the Supreme Court had to use the existing protocol frameworks eHerkenning, Advocatenpas, and DigiD to establish the authenticity of 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 protocol frameworks 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). This incompatibility was 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 administrative justice portal via Single Sign-On and handle legal proceedings online.