Association certificate

An association certificate is a qualified certificate that identifies an electronic seal as belonging to an association, not a company.

A qualified certificate identifies the holder of an electronic seal as an association - a club, sports federation, trade body, alumni network or similar membership organisation. Under eIDAS, an electronic seal can only be created by a legal person, and an association counts as one wherever it holds legal personality under national law. This sets an association apart from a company such as a BV or NV, which instead receives a company certificate. It is issued the same way as any other qualified electronic seal certificate: a qualified trust service provider verifies who the applicant is, checks that the applicant is entitled to request a seal on the association's behalf, and then issues a qualified certificate naming the association as the subject. The association's name itself is carried in the organization field of the certificate's X.509 subject, the same field a company certificate uses to record a company's name.

Verifying an association raises a question that a company rarely does: who is currently authorised to represent it.

• a company has a director recorded in the trade register.
• an association relies on a board that can change between members' meetings without the register being updated at the same moment.

The registration authority therefore also establishes, alongside the association's own identity verification, which of its current board members holds the mandate to request and use the certificate - drawing where possible on the association's statutes, its trade register extract and its most recent minutes of appointment as supporting evidence for that mandate.

Note: An association is not always listed in the trade register - under the Handelsregisterwet 2007 (art. 5-6) and articles 2:29 and 2:30 of the Burgerlijk Wetboek, only associations that run a business, or those with full legal capacity created by notarial deed, are obliged to register. Where no register entry exists, a trust service provider instead establishes the association's existence and representation from its statutes and internal records.