Mandate

A mandate is legal authorisation to represent someone else - eHerkenning, DigiD Machtigen and EUDI Wallet attestations make it provable online.

A mandate is the legal authorisation and representation power to act on behalf of someone else - an employee for a company, an accountant for a client. This authorisation can be arranged through a power of attorney (volmacht), a formal legal instrument that for most acts can simply be put in writing. Digital services need mandates to be provable and checkable too: eHerkenning built its entire scheme around mandate registration, including ketenmachtiging for chains of intermediaries. DigiD Machtigen lets citizens register someone else to act for them, for example a family member handling government affairs. A parent acting for a minor child is different again: that is statutory legal representation (wettelijke vertegenwoordiging), which follows from the law rather than being granted, though notaries and the KVK still register who may represent a legal person. Delegation is a distinct legal concept from mandate, and the terminology differs by context: in public law, mandaat and delegatie have specific, separate meanings under the Awb.

In the EUDI Wallet era mandates become attestations: a signed, revocable statement that person X may perform action Y for organisation Z, presented from the wallet and verified against the authentic source. The Architecture and Reference Framework discusses this kind of attestation informally as a Power of Representation (PoR); the draft European Business Wallet regulation goes further, defining a mandate directly (Article 3(19)) and naming the creation, management and delegation of mandates as one of its core functions (Article 3(1)(c)). Certificates can also carry the representation role directly, so a signature proves the capacity in which someone signed; because that role is fixed at issuance, an ended authority typically needs to be addressed through certificate revocation rather than a live register check, unlike attestation- or register-based mandates.