Review of the electronic transactions Act

The Electronic Transactions Act,  approved by Law No. 3/2017   of 9 January 2017 (“LTE”) lays down the legal  framework for (i) electronic transactions (“any communication or activity between two parties conducted by electronic means”), (ii) e-commerce (“economic activity under which a person offers or guarantees through an electronic  mean the provision of goods and/or services”), and (iii) e-government (“the use of Information and communications technology, mainly the Internet, by the government to provide information and services to citizens “) and it is applicable to natural and legal, public and individual persons.

The main objective of the LTE is to create legal security in the electronic transactions (“TE”), as a means of communication for rendering services and consumption, through the establishment of a legal framework and the respective penalties for cyber offenses, in order to promote public and private investment, the use of technologies, and make the TE faster.

The LTE created the National Institute of Information and Communication Technologies/Instituto Nacional de Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação, which functions include to assign and manage the domain “.mz”, to ensure compliance with LTE  through inspection and supervision, to implement the e-government, to license service intermediaries for networking and communications systems, to ensure the implementation of the State’s electronic certification service, to promote the application of TE and to protect the consumer in the context of transactions, e-commerce and e-government.

In summary, the LTE  covers the following aspects: grants legal effect to data messages or information in electronic format, provided that they satisfy  some legal requirements and formalities; sets out requirements for the certification of  electronic signatures and the use of data messages as legal evidence; gives legal effectiveness to electronic messages in  the process of contract formation; regulates e-commerce; assigns to  Bank of Mozambique the power to issue safety assurance standards for all payments made  through electronic payment instruments and assigns responsibility to the issuers of electronic payment instruments. The LTE also sets the legal framework for consumer protection in contracts related to e-commerce; creates the legal framework for e-government, which gives legal effectiveness to the care and rendering of electronically services in public administration and sets and regulates the Digital Certification System and Encryption, which provides security mechanisms to ensure authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of information and documents used in the TE.

The adoption of this law appears to be of extremely importance, given the massive use of information and communication technologies (“ICT”), it has laid down a general legal framework from protection of users of ICT for trade and investment, creating, among others, legal security mechanisms in the entering of contracts, standards of protection of consumer rights, the allocation of probative value to the TE and the creation of a framework to cyber offenses.

However, given the involvement of the various areas of law, such as Commercial Law, Administrative Law, Banking Law, among others, seems necessary to set specific regulations to each of the areas covered.

Vanessa Fernandes

Lawyer