A Feasibility Study on Reliability of Electronic Evidence in Jurisprudence, with a Glance at the Law of Electronic Commerce in Iran

Nowadays, with the widespread development, “electronic documents” are increasingly produced and stored. In the Iranian Electronic Commerce Law, the probative value of documents as evidence in substantiation of claims has been accepted by the legislator; the issue of accreditation of electronic evidence from the perspective of jurisprudence has not been addressed.Their main reason for this is the possibility of forgery and fraud in documents, which makes them invalid. After collecting the remarks of the jurists in this regard and reviewing and examining them through an analytical method, we have concluded that the written documents do not have any superiority over electronic ones and thus, both of them should be treated and if appropriate safety measures are taken in order to protect the contents of the documents, electronic documents can be considered as the evidence in substantiation of claims (either independently or as a conjecture which will have impact on the judge’s decision), and then this kind of documents can be relied on to prove the claim in the courts