Presentation notariat-allemand-2013-04-26-en

1. The interconnection of
European registers of wills
Karel TOBBACK, ENRWA President

2. ENRWA Background
• January 2001: CNUE General assembly plans to create a
European network of registers of wills
• January 2002: the Franco-belgian interconnection is
operational
• June 2002: official launch of the European Network of
Registers of Wills (ENRW)

3. ENRWA Background
• 8 July 2005: creation of the European Registers of Wills
Association (ENRWA), opened to the administrators of
registers of wills and to the candidates for the establishment
of such register
• Funding members of ENRWA: Belgian, French and Slovenian
Notariat
• Close collaboration between the ENRWA and the Notaries of
Europe due to the role played by civil law notaries in the
settlement of the succession

4. ENRWA Goals
• Simplify the recognition of all dematerialised exchanges
between European bodies of notaries or public authorities in
order, in particular, to facilitate the mutual recognition and
execution of successions
• Create a European network linking the administrators of
national registers of wills in order to give to the European
citizens the possibility to find wills of their relatives

5. ENRWA members and partners
• Currently, the association is present in 19 States:
– the association has 17 members : the Notariats of Austria,
Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Hungary, Italia, Latvia,
Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania,
Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the region of St Petersburg
– the association has 2 partners: Estonian and Lithuanian registers
• International non profit association (AISBL) establish under
Belgian law. Headquarter in Brussels

6. ENRWA members and partners

7. Join the ENRWA
• Categories of members:
– Founding members
– Ordinary members
– Observer members
– Associate members
• Art. 7 of the bylaws: “All members have an equal right to vote
at General Meetings and every member is entitled to one
vote.”
• Principle: one member per State

8. Membership categories
• Founding members: Notariats of Belgium, France and
Slovenia
• Ordinary members: Notariats of the European Union which
participate in exchanges within the ENRW
• Observer members: Notariats of the EU which do not yet
participate in exchange within the ENRW
• Associate members: others organizations supporting the
association's purpose

9. The ENRWA tools
• The ENRWA tools establish a link between registers of wills
(and not directly between notaries)
• There are two ways to be interconnected at the RERT
platform:
– The ENRW/RERT: automated interconnection of the national
registers of wills
– The RERT Light : thanks to a local correspondent, a national
register can query and be queried by the others registers of wills
• RERT/ENRW and RERT Light are both connected at the RERT
Platform: so a national register can query all registers linked at
the platform regardless of connection mode

10. Operation of the platform
RERT Platform
Country A Register – RERT
Light
Country B Register –
RERT/ENRWCountry A Notary
Register
interconnected
via
RERT/ENRW
Register
interconnected
via RERT Light
Local
correspondent

11. Which registers are interconnected?

12. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
Legal framework
• The Basel convention relating to the establishment of a
system for the registration of wills of May 16, 1972
• National registers interconnected at the RERT platform must
be in a signatory State of the Basel convention or sign the
ENRWA Code of conduct that maintains its principles

13. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
• Based on mutual trust among national registers of wills
• Secrecy of the existence of the content of the last will
dispositions during the testator’s lifetime. It’s means that all
queries concerned death persons
• Information sent and received via the RERT platform comes
from the Basel Convention

14. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
• Mandatory’s data:
– Date of death
– Testator surname and first names
– Date and place of birth
– When the answer is positive: name and address of
notary(ies) that hold the last will(s)
• Optional fields:
- Name of the spouse of the testator
- Address of the testator

15. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
Technical framework
• Every message exchanged will contain a single query or a
single answer. Where queries need to be submitted to several
countries, the issuing register must create as many messages
as there are target register
• The contact details of foreign notarial offices which are
communicated to national notaries are valid only at a given
time. In the event of the consultation of the history of
answers communicated, changes of address or successions of
notaries are not taken into account

16. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
• The national registers and the RERT platform communicate in
the form of Web services. The principle is that every
organisation has, at the level of the system nucleus (RERT
platform), a mailbox, which it uses to send and receive
messages in asynchronous mode
RERT platform
FR
IT
NL
SP

17. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
• Every message sent via Web services will be formatted in XML
• Finally, in order to ensure that the special characters of
certain languages are supported, all XML documents are
encoded in UTF-8

18. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
The Web service of the RERT platform comprises two items:
 A header, corresponding to a data structure containing routing
and message management information such as the
identification of the mailboxes of recipients, flow type and the
conversation identifier
• All the conversation identifiers are created by the RERT
platform in order to ensure the uniqueness of identifiers.
• In this way, whenever a register wants to open a
conversation with another register, it must first of all
contact the RERT platform to obtain a new conversation
identifier. It will then use this identifier in the headers of all
messages pertaining to the new conversation
 An attachment corresponding to the XML data of the message
which corresponds to the query data or the response data

19. Operating principles of the RERT
Platform
• The RERT platform does not provide for the long-term storage
of messages exchanged. A message is kept on the platform
solely for the time needed to route it to its recipient; as soon
as the message is received an acknowledgement of receipt is
sent
• The RERT platform serves as data exchange middleware
between registers and therefore, by the same token, it does
not offer a results display service. It should be borne in mind
that the results are provided in XML format, and XSL
technology is one means available to enable results to be
displayed in local applications

20. Liability
• The ENRWA is an association that links national registers of
wills: the risks inherent in the provision of information
relating to a testator’s last will must be covered by the holder
of the national register, and more particularly by the
production of third-party liability insurance when the holder
is not a Government body
• Then, the national registers of wills generally choose to place
the final responsibility on the notaries for information that is
filled by them but it’s a choice of each national register

21. Data protection
• Data protection aspects are regulated in the agreement on
the use of the RERT Light/RERT
• Regarding the ENRWA, the User’s personal data are
processed in accordance with the provision of French law
• Each register of wills has to comply with its national law and
fulfill its legal obligations

22. Data protection
• User data are kept 2 years
• One time per year the data are communicated at the
national register for invoicing reasons
• The ENRWA encourages each national register to keep record
of its own queries and of received answers

23. Security measures
• The RERT platform needs to ensure the security of inter-
register exchanges and to manage in particular the following
problems:
Authentication in order to ensure that only authorised
entities can send queries via the RERT platform
Non-repudiation in order to ensure that no register can
deny having sent a query or a response
Integrity in order to ensure that data are not altered
during exchanges

24. Security measures
• To respond to these issues, exchanges are certified: the
objective of the RERT platform is to process only certified
messages, in order to guarantee to interconnected registers
the origin of the messages they receive
• The SSL certification system has been selected

25. The RERT Light
• The RERT Light is a secure web access. It’s not a automated
interconnexion at the RERT platform
• National registers connected via RERT Light designate one or
two persons in charge of:
- making the queries for all legal professionals involved with
the settlement of the successions in their country
- answering at the foreign queries within the deadline
determined in the RERT Light agreement (optional possibility)
• Each national register is free to organize the way of
communication with its legal professionals involve with the
settlement of the successions

26. The RERT/ENRW
• The national register of wills is interconnected with the
national register of wills: it’s not a new tool for notaries, it’s a
tool implemented in their national register
• The national register choose how it will implement this tool
within the respects of technical specifications and of the
operating principles of the RERT platform
• Download and upload queries and answers via webservice in
the form of XML flow

27. The RERT/ENRW
• Every register interconnected via the RERT/ENRW must build
the following general functionalities into its information system :
A list of countries to which queries may be sent
Adapt the time it takes to respond to queries according to
the time limits of foreign registers
Provide for the development of programs for sending and
receiving queries to and from foreign organisations
Provide for the rejection of non-compliant queries
Adapt its query reports to incorporate the responses from
foreign registers

28. The RERT/ENRW
Security measures
• The principle is that each register that is part of the RERT
network will have an X.509 certificate which will serve as an
authentication token on the exchange platform. For its part,
the RERT platform will use this certificate both to ensure
authentication and validate its access authorisations, and to
load routing information

29. Thanks for attention
Questions?