Emails need not be signed with guaranteed electronic signature

The Constitutional Court's ruling of June 2025 (IV. ÚS 3261/24) clarified the requirements for electronic signatures in court submissions and other filings. The dispute, which at first glance may seem like a formality, may indeed have a significant effect on the fundamental right to judicial protection and on the rules of electronic communication.

When details decide big issues

Dopravní Stavby Silnic s.r.o. appealed against a judgment of the District Court for Prague 1, which upheld a plaintiff’s action and ordered the company to pay CZK 22,900 with interest.

The company submitted its appeal by email as an attachment in pdf format with an affixed recognised electronic signature based on a qualified certificate (i.e., a guaranteed electronic signature), while the email itself did not contain a guaranteed electronic signature. The district court disregarded the appeal: in its opinion, the guaranteed electronic signature should have been included directly in the email by which the appeal was sent as it was impossible to verify the identity of the person making the submission. The company disagreed with the district court's approach and brought the matter before the Constitutional Court.

Distinction between email and submission

In its ruling, the Constitutional Court distinguished between a procedural submission and a data message carrier (email). It emphasised that only the submission on the merits is a legally relevant act within the meaning of the Code of Civil Procedure, and therefore the requirement for a guaranteed electronic signature applies only to it. In the present case, the email message merely served as an imaginary envelope to deliver the appeal in electronic form to the district court. A guaranteed electronic signature does not need to be attached to something that by its content is not a submission (in the present case, the email message). According to the Constitutional Court, the envelope and the submission on the merits cannot be artificially separated but must be viewed as a whole. 

The Constitutional Court also added that in the present case, the identity of the person making the submission was clearly identifiable from the signed document (the submission) which was attached to the email. Therefore, the district court’s approach was unconstitutional as it should not have disregarded the appeal.

Effects of the ruling

The Constitutional Court's ruling brings important clarifications that do not only apply to procedural submissions. The ruling shows that an email message itself does not necessarily have to be signed with a guaranteed electronic signature if its attachment contains such a signature. By this decision, the Constitutional Court has clearly opposed excessive formalism and confirmed that the technical form of communication must not stand in the way of parties to proceedings exercising their fundamental rights.