On November 23, 2005 the UN General Assembly passed the Convention on the Use of Electronic Communications in International Contracting.

The document was worked out by the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). The basic task UNCITRAL was facing while developing the Convention was to bring the trade norms into conformity with the demands of time, when mailing is electronic rather then paper. The authors of the project were aiming at creating common principles of electronic trade accessible for similar use both in Belarus, Russia or the USA.

The convention is top open. It is of advisory nature. According to article 3, for instance, the parties may leave out the application of the Convention or deviate from any of its clauses or change its activity.

Containing a great number of provisos, the Convention may be applied only to a narrow class of relationship. In particular, it doesn’t regulate transactions at stock market and with foreign currency, is not applied to operations with bills of exchange, way-bills and other documents enabling the parties to demand commodity supply or money payment. The transactions regulated by the Convention mustn’t deal with interbank payment systems and payment agreements. And, certainly, the Convention doesn’t deal with the treaties concluded in private, personal or domestic aims.

The UN member states may sign the Convention from January 16, 2006 till January 16, 2008. After six month starting from the day at least three countries sign it the Convention will go into force.

The Convention is of great value as it has modernized former UNCITRAL treaties and conventions (Standard laws of electronic commerce (1996-98) and Of electronic signature (2001-02)). The notion of e-mails joins in the six previously adopted UN conventions, including the Convention of recognition and execution of arbitral awards. The decision of modernization of other treaties is then up to the signatories of the Convention.

The new points in the Convention are the regulations of parts’ location and the questions related to the decision of mailing date. So the location of the participants of international e-mailing is determined according to the location of a business organization/enterprise. At that the business organization is not a business organization only for the reason that it contains facilities, means of support of information systems and access to information system for other parts.

One can conclude from the definition of “a business”, the Convention contains[1], that it deals with the legal address or a point where the major financial flows of the correspondent take place.

The convention is also related to the problem of choosing an appropriate form of a mail and automatized systems for the conclusion of treaties.

The states which will sign the Convention will have to admit the main regulation of the whole Convention, which is “a message or a treaty may not be declared invalid or proclaimed devoid of power only because they are composed as a e-mail”.

Besides, the Convention does not require a particular composition form and practically allows using e-mails when the law requires written messages. An e-mail, in its turn, has to contain a signature corresponding to the agreement aims.

The document also introduces the notion of electronic offer and allows concluding agreements using automatized messaging systems. Moreover, a situation for concluding a valid treaty between automatized message systems is stipulated. In particular, it is assumed that the treaty may not be declared invalid only because a natural person hasn’t controlled the process and examined the agreement.

The regulation of sending and receiving location and time also seems rather interesting. So the time the mail leaves the information system is the sending time, and the moment the recipient may take it from his box is the receiving time. This means that the moment of receiving and, for instance, the loading of a mail or examination moment do not coincide.

Besides, when the location of sending or receiving is required, the mail is considered to have been sent from the address of a sending business, and was received at the address of a business enterprise recipient, regardless of the mail addresses the parties used.

Special emphasis is given to a traditional question of jurisdiction covering suits against Internet-located enterprises. The liability was often evaded by registering the appropriate domain name someplace on the Cayman Islands moving a hosting to the area beyond the reach of law machinery. The authors of the project offer not to consider a priori that the country of a business enterprise coincides with that of the domain and e-mail address related to some country.

Thus, one of the most difficult legal problems is resolved, which is how to move the investigation from the sphere of virtual relations to that of real ones in conformity with international law norms.

Though regardless of its advantages, the Convention is evidently of little use for real business tasks.

It’s not worth saying that in the course of several years the notions of “World Wide Web”, “domain name”, “e-mail address” may transform immensely through press of businessmen, politicians and web-programmers and the touched upon problems will lose their topicality.

But the Convention approached to the comprehension of global relations essence. The document allows not taking into consideration the fact that the sides’ business enterprises are located in different countries. Moreover, neither the state of the sides, nor their civil or trade status, nor the civil or trade nature of the treaty is taken into account during the decision of Convention application.