ETSI (European Technical Standards Institute) has the function of issuing technical standards by delegation in the EU eIDAS Regulation (European Union Regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the internal market).
AES and QES have a higher evidentiary value than simple or ‘standard’ electronic signatures.
[3] PAdES standards travel in the same direction and have the same aims as digital signatures (AES and QES).
This means they can be easily verified in any PDF reader and as[5] PAdES has 4 levels of verification for digital certificate, from the most simple and basic (b-b, indicating a signature was executed with a certificate that was valid on a date) to the most complex (b-LTV) allowing electronically signed documents to remain valid for long periods (long term validity) even if underlying cryptographic algorithms or the other certificates expired.
PAdES allows certificates to be verified even after many decades at any time in the future, in spite of technological and other advances.
[4] Like PAdES, they are legally binding in the European Union and suited for applications that do not involve human-readable documents: Cryptographic Message Syntax Advanced Electronic Signatures (CAdES) and XML Advanced Electronic Signatures (XAdES).