Public faith as a legally protected interest against document forgery

Abstract

The criminal protection of public trust against the falsification and fraudulent use of documents in Ecuador faces increasing challenges with digitalization. Falsification, whether material altering the medium or ideological introducing deceptive content goes beyond individual harm and undermines collective trust in certification and legal publicity systems, affecting the security of transactions. Public trust, as an institutional legal good, is based on three regulatory pillars: the Constitution, which recognizes the notarial service and its authority; the Notarial Law, which regulates the notarial function and establishes formalities that ensure authenticity and integrity; and the Comprehensive Organic Criminal Code, whose Article 328 defines these offenses and sets penalties according to the nature of the document. Case law, exemplified by Case No. 17294-2017-01351, confirms that the classification of a document as public or private depends on its origin and the competent authority, not on the place where the alteration occurred, and that the greater institutional trust placed in public documents justifies a harsher penalty. Digitalization poses evidentiary challenges that require strengthening the verification of origin, integrity, and traceability through tools such as metadata, time stamps, and chains of custody, ensuring functional equivalence between physical and electronic media. The proportionality in the application of penalties must be based on material criteria of harmfulness to avoid symbolic expansions of criminal law, reserving sanctions for cases with a real capacity to deceive and providing for full reparation according to the impact on collective trust.