Role in the exchange of evidence
Article 15
1. Member States shall ensure that, for the purpose of the evidence exchange through the OOTS, the evidence providers or intermediary platforms, where applicable, shall use application services capable of the following: (a) receiving and interpreting evidence requests delivered by an eDelivery Access Point, which shall be considered as the input to the data services; (b) subject to successful identification and authentication in accordance with Article 16 of this Regulation: (i) retrieving any pieces of evidences matching the request; (ii) except in the case of the procedures referred to in Article 14(5) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1724, allow users to specify which of these pieces of evidence they wish to preview and give them the possibility to preview the pieces thus specified in a preview space; (iii) allow users to indicate which, if any, of the matching pieces of evidence should be returned to the evidence requester for use in the procedure; (c) returning evidence responses to the evidence requester through an eDelivery Access Point, subject to the user’s decision to use the evidence in the procedure following the possibility to preview it, except in the case of the procedures referred to in Article 14(5) of Regulation (EU) 2018/1724, error reports, including in the situation referred to in Article 16(3), point (a), of this Regulation, or reports concerning evidence in the process of being converted. 2. If an evidence response is returned, it shall include the requested evidence and be accompanied by: (a) metadata that uniquely identifies the evidence response; (b) metadata that uniquely identifies the evidence request; (c) metadata that indicates the date and time at which the response was generated; (d) metadata that uniquely identifies the evidence and the evidence provider; (e) where structured evidence does not comply with the OOTS data model relevant for the evidence type concerned, a human-readable version of the evidence. 3. The evidence response may also include the metadata that uniquely identifies the language or languages of the requested evidence. 4. If an error report is returned, it shall include metadata that uniquely identifies the evidence request, the date and time at which it was generated and a description of the error that occurred. 5. Where evidence is not yet available for exchange through the OOTS but in the process of being converted to structured or unstructured evidence as defined in Article 1, points (16) and (17), a report as referred to in paragraph 1, point (c), of this Article shall be returned. That report shall include metadata that uniquely identifies the evidence request, the date and time at which it was generated and a message that the evidence concerned is in the process of being converted to structured or unstructured evidence as defined in Article 1, points (16) and (17), and will be ready for the transmission through the OOTS in the future. The evidence provider shall include in the report the preliminary date and time for when the evidence will be available.