Case Study: European Court of Human Rights achieves secure, paperless case workflows with DocuSign

The European Court of Human Rights Adds Digital Signatures to its SharePoint Platform

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg handles over 65,000 applications a year and produces roughly 500,000 letters that require signatures. While the Court had automated much of its case management with a SharePoint-based workflow and OpenText eDocs, manual "wet" signatures — printing, routing, signing and rescanning — remained a costly bottleneck and security vulnerability.

To solve this, the ECHR implemented DocuSign Signature Appliance (CoSign), fully integrated with its SharePoint workflows and Microsoft Active Directory to provide time-stamped, verifiable digital signatures on Word and PDF documents. The change removed paper routing and rescanning, strengthened signer authentication, sped up turnaround, reduced overhead to near zero, and now about 200 staff sign electronically — with an estimated three million letters signed digitally since deployment, keeping hundreds of thousands of annual cases on track.

European Court of Human Rights

John Hunter

Head of IT Division