Building a standard: Europe's response to the breeder document challenge

Recognising a problem is one thing. Doing something about it in a structured, internationally credible way is quite another. But in the case of breeder documents, Europe has been doing exactly that. Through one of the continent's most established standardisation bodies, it is producing a technical specification that could reshape civil registration for generations.

The body behind the work

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) is the recognised body for developing voluntary standards across Europe. Its members are the national standardisation bodies (NSBs) of 34 European countries. Beyond these, CEN Partners include non-European NSBs and European organisations, giving the body a reach that extends well beyond the continent's borders. CEN’s Technical Committee 224 (TC224) covers Personal identification, electronic signature and cards and their related systems and operations,  the institutional home of much of the expert knowledge that has shaped identity documents across Europe and beyond. It was within TC224 that Working Group 19 (WG19) was established to lead standardisation activities specifically in the field of breeder documents. The first WG19 meetings took place in March 2017 in Oslo.

As of March 2024, WG19 counted 43 registered members drawn from Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, alongside representatives from ANEC and ETSI. The group meets quarterly and its membership reflects the cross-sectoral nature of the challenge: it brings together public sector officers – civil registration authorities, government identity specialists, and border management professionals – alongside subject matter experts from private industry, all participating in their individual expert capacity rather than as representatives of their organisations.

What the standard covers

WG19 is developing the CEN Technical Specification series TS 17489, titled Secure and Interoperable European Breeder Documents. Its scope covers birth certificates, marriage and partnership certificates, and death certificates, along with the management processes associated with them: registration, issuance, renewal, verification, and revocation. The specification is designed to remain independent of specific technologies: it does not aim to impose a single form factor but instead, focuses on strengthening the issuance processes and their oversight.

The series is structured across five parts. Part 1, published in 2020, establishes the overall framework: common terminology, definitions, and an informative overview of the architecture to follow. Part 2, published in 2023, defines an abstract data model for breeder document data. It provides a semantic description of the information contained in birth, marriage and death certificates, designed to be both extensible and independent of any specific encoding format. As a result, it can be applied to documents regardless of whether they are paper-based, server-based or hardware-based.

Part 3 addresses the basic technologies: a visual electronic seal using a two-dimensional barcode for offline authenticity verification; a contactless chip and associated file structure for digital breeder documents; and detailed physical document specifications covering material features, security printing techniques, copy protection and personalisation methods.

At the time of writing, the working group was evaluating existing technology frameworks to determine their suitability for adoption, rather than creating new solutions when proven alternatives already exist. Frameworks under consideration include those developed by ICAO for travel documents, the European Digital Product Passport, eIDAS framework and ISO 18013, the international standard for mobile driving licences. The aim is to draw on established, interoperable approaches wherever appropriate, avoiding fragmentation and ensuring coherence with adjacent identity ecosystems.

Part 4 translates these building blocks into concrete profiles for each certificate type, enabling genuine interoperability across administrations and borders.

Part 5, published in 2024, addresses trust establishment and management. This is where the standard expands beyond the document itself to consider the institutional and procedural environment in which breeder documents are generated and used – a recognition that technology alone cannot solve a problem rooted partly in process and governance.

Alongside the TS 17489 series, WG19 is also contributing to the development of an updated version of DIN 91379, Characters and Defined Character Sequences in Unicode for the Electronic Processing of Names and Data Exchange in Europe. Originally a German national standard, DIN 91379 defines the normative subset of unicode characters and character sequences required for the correct electronic representation of personal and legal names across European languages and scripts, including Latin letters with diacritics, transliteration mappings for non-Latin scripts, and the character sets covering all EU official languages as well as those of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.

The group is working to elevate this to an international standard, a step that would benefit TS 17489 directly – accurate and interoperable name rendering being a foundational requirement for any breeder document data model – while also serving the broader ecosystem of identity, civil registration and border management systems that face the same challenge of handling multilingual names reliably across jurisdictions.

Connecting to the global picture

WG19 does not operate in isolation. It maintains a formal liaison with TC224/WG18, which focuses on biometrics, and the two groups coordinate their meeting schedules to capitalise on synergies—particularly important given the complexities of capturing biometric data for infants and children in civil registration. Beyond Europe, WG19 engages actively with the UN Legal Identity Expert Group (LIEG) and with organisations across Africa, Oceania, and the Pacific, with the explicit goal of gradually incorporating additional regions. The intention is not to impose a European model, but to draw on the unique traditions, requirements and successful practices of different regions, ensuring the standard embodies a truly global range of experience.

At global level, this work aligns with ICAO's Traveller Identification Programme (TRIP), particularly the ICAO Guidance on Evidence of Identity. A revised edition of this guidance is currently in development and has already obtained conceptual approval from the ICAO Technical Advisory Group (TAG). The update is expected to explicitly reference CEN prTS 17489-5. WG19 members are also participating in a dedicated subgroup of the ICAO ICBWG responsible for drafting the new Evidence of Identity Guide, establishing a direct link that ensures the European standard can both inform and gain recognition within the wider international framework.

Expertise in action

For security printers and identity document specialists, the TS 17489 series represent familiar territory seen from a new angle. The specification calls on exactly the kinds of materials science, security printing expertise, chip integration knowledge and process assurance methodology that underpin high-security travel documents. The challenge is to apply these capabilities to a document category that has historically sat outside the industry's core focus – and to do so in a way that respects the diversity of civil registration traditions across European member states.

Yet perhaps the most distinctive challenge here has no real parallel in the world of travel documents: the technology must function reliably across highly independent administrations and, critically, over the potential span of a human lifetime. A passport is valid for ten years; the cryptographic framework underpinning it may be refreshed within a similar cycle. A birth certificate, by contrast, may need to be verified eighty or ninety years after it was issued, by systems and administrations that did not exist when it was created. Consider the gulf between the data recording and secure storage technologies available a century ago and those we rely on today – and then consider that the standards being written now must anticipate an equivalent leap in the other direction. The emergence of post-quantum computing alone presents a challenge that cannot be deferred: cryptographic approaches considered robust today may be vulnerable within years, not decades.

Designing a framework that is both technically credible now and structurally resilient over a human lifetime is a genuinely novel problem for the identity industry, and one that makes this standardisation effort as intellectually demanding as it is consequential.

Technology alone, however, cannot carry the full weight of this challenge. A framework that must remain coherent across independent administrations and over the span of a human life requires something more durable than any cryptographic standard: a foundation of trust and policy. A third article in this series explores precisely that – the governance architecture that Part 5 of TS 17489 provides, and why it may prove as consequential as the technical specification it accompanies.

Author: Stephan D. Hofstetter, Editor of CEN prTS 17489-5 and Managing Partner of SECOIA Executive Consultants AG, updated for Noted. by Intergraf.