# IMPERIUM NOTE ### The Tribunals Engine under the Imperium: law as a verifiable input to machine action *This note of 2026-10-20 supersedes the note of 2026-10-03 (sha256 fe493cd45e61168f694dad82e2365d00c4b4654aaead1a9b1582da7dea5b9843), which was published with placeholders in square brackets; that text is retained unchanged at records/IMP_HASTOR-1_STATUS_20261003.md. What changed: the placeholders are filled from the Engine's own registers, the section "What the register holds at this note" is added, and the publication of the number is stated as it will happen — without notice; the earlier text's announcement period is withdrawn. Nothing else of the earlier text is altered. This note is sealed in the same way: a later state of the register is a new note beside it, never an edit of this one.* **We are publishing this before it can be verified, and sealing it so that it cannot be changed afterward.** The system described here is built and has passed its own gates. The number that makes it checkable by the public is published without notice at https://cohereon.io/records/; this page is updated when it is. This document states in advance what you will be able to check. Its hash is published beside it. It will not be edited after the number is published. --- ## The claim An automated system can now cite a provision of international law such that any third party, holding the citation and one published number, can verify that the words are the depositary's own, unchanged by a character; that a named human, whose identity was proofed, adjudicated them as a fact of record and signed; that the source was current to a stated date under an enforced re-acquisition cadence; that the corpus the citation came from is the one the publisher signed; and that the agent which cited them is a principal whose identity and history are recoverable from the record after the process that acted has ceased to exist. No clause of this requires the operator's cooperation or word. Each is checked by running the shipped verifier against the published number. --- ## One scene A targeting assistant receives an instruction. Before acting, it checks the instruction against the Geneva Conventions — not a summary, not a model's recollection, but the deposited text, each sentence sealed with a fingerprint and signed by a named adjudicator. The instruction contradicts a sealed provision. The system refuses, attaches the words, and the refusal is logged with the time and the state of the system under which it was issued. Months later, in another country, someone holding only that record and one published number confirms every part of it — the words, the signatory, the date, the agent — without contacting the organization that fielded the system, and without that organization's consent. That is what the Tribunals Engine is built to do; which families it holds at this note is stated below. The rest of this document says why it matters, what it is, and how you will check it. --- ## What it is, plainly Treaties, conventions and model laws are long, so people and software work from summaries, and summaries drift. The Engine removes the summary. It keeps only the original words, cut from the officially deposited text, recorded by position and sealed with a fingerprint so that a changed character is detectable. Named experts, whose identities are verified before they may sign, mark which sentences are facts of record for each body of law. The signing tool will not let them sign anything that is not in the text they cite. Where a treaty leaves a term undefined, the record says so; it does not guess. What the Engine produces are signed packets of these facts, sent out through a directory that refuses forgeries, altered packets and practice runs. Each packet carries the fingerprint of the rules it was issued under and of the state of the system at the time. Law changes. The Engine re-fetches every source on a fixed schedule and refuses to serve anything older than the schedule allows. Its own configuration is locked to a baseline taken at installation, and only the organization that runs it can move that baseline, by a deliberate human act that no process can perform. Anyone can check it. The Engine publishes one number that summarizes everything inside it and ships a small independent checker. Someone outside the organization, holding only the Engine's output and that number, runs the checker and gets PASS or FAIL. The organization's word is not required. --- ## What changes **The medium of law, and who can verify it.** Every medium law has had — oral, written, printed, databased, and now modelled — has fixed who could verify what the law said. In each, a reader at a distance from the custodian relied on an intermediary: a reciter, a copyist, a printer, a publisher, a database, a model trained on all of them. The intermediary's fidelity was a matter of reputation. A machine's citation of law is the weakest form this has ever taken: a model's recollection, bound to no source, uncheckable by the party receiving it because nothing in it points back. The Engine is a medium in which a citation carries its source by hash, its adjudicator by signature, its date by cadence and its corpus by a published root. Verification is a computation any party can run; it is no longer a judgement any party must make. **Trust moves from the institution to the number.** For as long as there have been custodians of law, the authority of a text has rested on the custodian's standing. Under the Engine, the authority of a served text rests on a hash that resolves to the depositary's own words, and the custodian's standing becomes irrelevant to the question of what the words are. This does not diminish custodians; it removes from them a burden they could never discharge at machine scale — being asked, by every reader and every agent, to be believed. **Machines become accountable principals.** An agent under the Imperium is not a process. It is a key, registered once as a principal, and the trail that key leaves across every phase of its existence: sessions opened and closed by a gate and journaled, encounters stamped at the directory with the rule and head current at the time, packets emitted under its signature. Authorization is held as a hypergraph whose every edge joins principal, key, session, rule, head and resource on a signed basis, recoverable at any past head. When the process dies — by exhaustion, by failure, by the loss of the machine — the agent is reconstituted from that trail: the same principal, the same history, the same obligations, by record and not by memory. An agent cannot shed its past by restarting. "Which agent did this, under what authority, at what moment" is answerable afterward by anyone holding the number, against the operator's interest if need be. This is the condition under which machine action can be held to law at all: that the actor persists as a subject of the record. **Adversaries verify the same objects.** Because every packet, every session and every head is reconstitutable from the published root, the party across the line can establish exactly what law a system held at the moment of an act, and the party that fielded the system cannot later dispute it. The textual dispute — what the provision said, whether it applied in that form, whether the rule had changed — which has absorbed a great share of every post-conflict accounting, is removed from the field in advance. Beneath every remaining dispute about facts and meaning there is now a layer that both sides hold identically and neither can alter. That layer did not exist before. **Law that survives machine tempo.** The emerging economy of non-human intelligence transacts, contracts and complies at a rate no human review can follow. Law written for human tempo has had two futures in that economy: to be ignored, or to be paraphrased into the systems that act — which is to be ignored more slowly. The Engine offers a third. A legal fact that is a first-class mathematical object can be composed, forwarded and checked by every agent in a chain without any of them trusting the one before. Law propagates at the speed of the agents, and each agent can refuse at that speed, with the provision attached. This is the difference between agents that can be held to law and agents that can only be asked about it. **Sovereignty without a central authority.** Any organization may run an installation. Verification requires no registry, no clearing house and no license from the publisher; it requires the number and the checker. Adjudication, by contrast, is never anonymous: every fact of record carries a named, proofed human. The two properties usually trade against each other — decentralized verification tends to anonymize, accountable adjudication tends to centralize. Here they hold at once, and a party as small as a single organization may bind its systems to the law of nations on terms a state cannot dispute and a court can read. **The makers under the same discipline.** The Engine was built inside a regime in which no decision is adopted by a machine, no verdict is a function of the clock, no change enters without a licence naming the files a probe measured, no adopted record is ever edited, and no process grades its own work — verification is always by a party that did not build. This document is that discipline applied to its own announcement: the claims are stated before they can be checked, sealed by hash, and will be judged against the published number rather than rewritten to fit it. --- ## Consequences **For parties under the law of armed conflict, in the age of non-human intelligence.** A party fielding autonomous or semi-autonomous systems has, until now, been able to bind those systems to the law only through an intermediary it could not audit. The duty to ensure that subordinates know the law — Additional Protocol I, Article 87 — had no verifiable form for a subordinate that is a machine. The Engine gives it one: a system bound to Engine packets is bound to the depositary's words of the Conventions and Protocols, current to a stated date, and the binding is a record the party's own inspectors, a counterparty, a court or a successor government can verify. The second consequence runs the other way: because every packet is reconstitutable by anyone holding the root, the party cannot afterward dispute what law its systems held at the time of an act — the head hash fixes the moment, the source hash the text, the cadence the currency. The third is operational: a machine subordinate can refuse. An instruction that contradicts a sealed provision can be refused with the provision attached, and the refusal is itself a signed, time-fixed record. The doctrine of the manifestly unlawful order, which has always depended on a human subordinate's courage and memory, acquires a form that neither fails under pressure nor forgets. **For parties under non-international armed conflict.** The instruments that bind a party to a non-international conflict are few and short — Common Article 3 of the four Conventions, and Additional Protocol II where it applies — and they are depositary texts within the Engine's unit. Their brevity has made them easy to misstate and easy to claim ignorance of. Under the Engine, the state's systems and the non-state party's systems can be bound to the same sealed words, each able to inspect the other's binding. For a non-state party this is new ground. Protocol II's threshold is organization: an armed group under responsible command, able to sustain operations and to implement the Protocol. A verifiable record that the group's systems are bound to the Protocol's own text, with named adjudication and current sources, is evidence of exactly the capacity the threshold names. The Engine does not confer status; it produces the record by which capacity to implement the law can be shown rather than asserted. A state facing such a party meets, for the first time, an opponent whose legal binding it can inspect. **For named natural persons with command responsibility.** Command responsibility turns on knowledge and on measures: the commander knew or should have known, and failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures within their power — Rome Statute Article 28; Protocol I Articles 86 and 87. Both limbs change when the law circulates as a first-class mathematical object at scale. Knowledge: where the provisions were available to the commander's own systems as sealed, current, signed packets, "should have known" is no longer a reconstruction of what a reasonable commander might have gathered; it is a lookup, and the adversary can prove what the commander's agents held when the order was given. Measures: the duty to ensure awareness, to prevent and to suppress has, for machine subordinates, a verifiable discharge — the binding of those systems, and the record of their refusals and of any override. A commander who bound their systems holds, in the same record the adversary holds, the evidence that the measures were taken. A commander who overrode a sealed refusal holds the evidence that they were not. The same holds for every other natural person in the chain: an adjudicator's signature on a fact of record and a publisher's signature on a root are durable, attributable acts. The Engine makes no one responsible who was not; it makes every responsibility that already existed legible, non-repudiable, and provable by the party with the strongest motive to prove it. **For the agents themselves.** The consequences above assume that "the agent that acted" can be found afterward. Under the Imperium it can, for the reasons given: identity is a key and a record, authorization is a recoverable hypergraph, and the agent is reconstituted from its trail rather than from any process. Command responsibility therefore reaches machine subordinates as continuing entities. The agent a commander bound, refused or overrode is recoverable as that agent — not as an unattributable instance that no longer exists. In sum: in machine-mediated conflict and commerce, the law's words stop being an argument and become an input, and the agents that act on them stop being transient and become accountable principals. What was litigated about the text is settled before the act by a hash. What remains — what was done, ordered and meant, and by which principal — is litigated against a record both sides can reconstruct and neither can alter. --- ## Formal specification The Tribunals Engine is an operational estate that renders authoritative legal instruments into machine-verifiable facts of record without restating them. Its unit of content is the proposition: a span of a depositary text — the treaty, convention or model law as deposited with its custodian — located by position within that text and bound by cryptographic hash both to the span and to the source from which it was cut. The Engine does not paraphrase; a proposition that is not the instrument's own words does not exist within it. Each instrument family — as the Engine's register names it: at release 0.11.2, eleven families of the UNCITRAL arbitration engine, with the instruments of international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute ingested and their families entering one by one as each is regrounded under the published worksheet (the section "What the register holds at this note", below) — is held as three things: its sources, the propositions cut from them, and the facts of record adjudicated over those propositions. A fact of record is signed by a named human adjudicator whose identity was proofed at registration. The signing instrument refuses any fact not located within the evidence it cites. Where an instrument leaves a term undefined, the fact records that condition; it is never resolved by inference. Facts of record leave the Engine as packets signed under an emitter key and published through a directory at which every packet carries the hash of the rule under which it was issued and the hash of the estate's head current at issue. A packet from another installation, a packet whose content differs from what was signed, and a packet produced in rehearsal are each refused at the directory by a mark of its own. Every source is re-acquired from its depositary on a stated cadence, and an index older than that cadence is refused by the Engine's own gate. Change is controlled against two baselines: a snapshot taken at installation, against which every later state is judged, and an acceptance baseline cut only by the operating organization's own act and never by a process. The publisher signs a root — one hash over the whole of the measured contents — and ships a verifier that holds nothing but the artifact and that number. A verdict of PASS from a verifier in another party's custody is the Engine's claim to correctness; it makes no claim it cannot support in that form. An agent under the Imperium is a principal registered once per key. Every act it performs leaves a signed, head-stamped record that is never removed: sessions opened at every turn and closed by the gate, with a refused turn released only against its own journaled refusal and only when the tree is as the gate judged it; encounters stamped at the directory; packets emitted under its signature. Authorization is a hypergraph whose edges join principal, key, session, rule, head and resource, each on a signed basis, recoverable at any past head. The agent is reconstituted from these after any loss of process as the same principal with the same obligations. --- ## Machine specification ``` ENTITY Tribunals Engine — an operational estate holding legal instruments as verifiable facts of record, under the Imperium — an estate in which every principal, act and authorization is a signed record. SOURCE depositary text; id = sha256(text); re-acquired every cadence_days from the depositary; served only while age <= cadence; a stale index is refused. PROPOSITION { source_id, span_locator, text (verbatim), sha256(source), sha256(text) }. an unlocated proposition does not exist. FAMILY { sources[], propositions[], facts_of_record[] }. families: as the register names them — 11 at release 0.11.2 (UNCITRAL arbitration); the IHL and ICL instruments ingested, their families entering as each is regrounded. FACT { proposition_refs[], status, method, adjudicator_id, signature }. refs outside cited evidence => refused by the signing tool. undefined term => UNDEFINED, never inferred. PRINCIPAL adjudicator: human; proofing record required at registration; signs facts. emitter: key; signs packets. publisher: key held off-process; signs the root and the verifier's pins. agent: key; registered once; identity = key + record, never a process. PACKET { class, facts[], emitter_signature, rule_hash, head_hash, installation_id }. refused at the directory if installation_id != local | content != signed | rehearsal. SPOOR every act of a principal leaves a signed, head-stamped record, never removed: sessions (opened per turn, closed by the gate, journaled), encounters (stamped), packets (signed). MATRIX authorization as a hypergraph; edge = { principal, key, session, rule, head, resource } with a signed basis; recoverable at any past head. REHYDRATION agent(key) := reconstitute(spoor, matrix, head). the resumed agent is the same principal with the same obligations, by record. BASELINE installation snapshot at install; acceptance baseline cut only by the organization's act. ROOT sha256 over the manifest of every measured file; signed by the publisher. VERIFY verify(artifact, root) -> PASS | FAIL; requires nothing from the operator; independent custody supported. INVARIANTS no paraphrase. no unlocated proposition. no unsigned fact. no fact outside its evidence. no stale source served. no packet without rule_hash and head_hash. no act without spoor. no identity without a key. no verdict a function of time. no self-grading. no claim without a verifiable root. ``` --- ## The Standard: IMP-COH-100 Part A The Engine and the estate around it are built under IMP-COH-100 Part A, the requirements of the regime. Part A is an enforcement standard, not an evidence standard: a clause is satisfied only when a named gate refuses its violation, that gate's refusing case and accepting control are in the battery, and the battery holds whole in both tree states under the published root. Beneath it, the established assurance and management standards are incorporated at their highest levels as a floor, each objective bound to nodes of one artifact graph and evaluated identically at every build; the derived exports regenerate byte-for-byte and are schema-valid. | Model | Level applied | Objectives | Predicate kinds | Exported as | |---|---|---|---|---| | RTCA DO-178C / EUROCAE ED-12C | DAL A; independence on 30 of 68 objectives | 68 | evidence, trace_complete, coverage | SAS, RM report, trace matrix | | NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | HIGH baseline | 369 | control_impl, evidence | OSCAL 1.2.2 SSP, AR, POA&M | | NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Privacy | Privacy baseline | 53 | control_impl | OSCAL SSP | | ISO 14971:2019 | Full | 20 | evidence | RM report | | NIST AI RMF 1.0 | Core (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage); the 72 extracted statements human-reviewed and signed before an installation baseline | 72 | evidence | Readiness record | | ISO/IEC 42001:2023 | Clauses 4–10 and Annex A | 64 | evidence, control_impl | Readiness record | | DARPA HACMS criteria | Full; the formal gate binding | 10 | evidence | Readiness record | | Estate ledgers (migration; publication) | — | 13 | evidence | Readiness record | | **IMP-COH-100 Part A** | **Edition 1.0 (2026-10)** | **38** | **enforced_by** | **Readiness record; the mark's headers** | | **Total** | | **707** | | | ### Part A operationalized | A.n | Requirement | Enforced by | Refuses | Evidence | Incorporates | Third-party check | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | | **Identity and measurement** | | | | | | | | Every artifact identified by content hash; the tree by one manifest; the release by one root. | Manifest over every measured file; root = hash of manifest; publisher-signed. | Any byte outside the manifest; any manifest not the signed root's. | Manifest, root, signature. | DO-178C CM; 800-53 CM-2/CM-8. | `verify(artifact, root)`. | | | Every derived document reproduces byte-for-byte from measured inputs. | Fixed-point gate: regenerate twice, compare. | A derivative differing from its regeneration. | Fixed-point verdict; the pack's regeneration. | DO-178C: derived data traceable. | The pack's regenerate-and-compare. | | | No verdict is a function of wall-clock time. | Gates judge tree state only; the pack runs to completion with no bound in the verdict's path. | A timed-out step as a pass; a clock in any rule. | The rule; the cases. | 800-53 AU-8. | No deadline in the verifier's steps. | | | **Change control** | | | | | | | | Every change licensed by a decision naming the files a probe measured. | Register gate; probe before adoption; anchor assertion on every edit. | A changed file no licence names; an anchor found other than once. | PR node; probe log; edit log. | DO-178C SCM; 800-53 CM-3. | PR paths vs. manifest diff. | | | An adopted decision is never edited; it is superseded by addendum. | Record rule; supersedes edge. | An adopted record whose hash moved. | Archived draft by hash; edge. | DO-178C baseline integrity. | Archive hash = stated hash. | | | Pinned evidence that changes is re-closed naming the run. | Register rules; re-close form. | A done action whose evidence hash moved without re-close. | Action node: hash, method, run. | DO-178C verification results under CM. | Every evidence hash resolves. | | | Two baselines: installation snapshot; acceptance baseline by the organization's act only. | Snapshot gate; acceptance tool runs only on a human's command. | A baseline retaken mid-round; a process invoking the act. | Snapshot; signed acceptance log. | DO-178C baselines; 42001 9.3. | Baseline hash in the register; signature. | | | The package is a function of tree content alone. | Dry run on scratch; build refused unless package and material hashes equal the rehearsal's. | A build whose hashes differ. | Attempt table; both hashes logged. | DO-178C reproducible build; SLSA-class provenance. | Two runs, one hash. | | | **Decisions and authority** | | | | | | | | A session drafts; only a human adopts; no process grades itself. | Status-line gate; verification by a party that did not build. | A record adopted by a process; a self-verdict. | The adopting word quoted; the pack in other custody. | 42001 5; AI RMF GOVERN. | The adopting signature is human. | | | Every rule exists only with a refusing case and an accepting control. | Battery; identifier uniqueness at registration. | A rule with no case; a duplicate identifier. | Verdict line; case table. | DO-178C requirements-based coverage; HACMS. | N/N, 0 gate defects, both states. | | | The battery is read against every round's own changes before the round runs. | Bounded reading: computed diff → every candidate read whole → four classes. | A case assuming a state the round removes. | Reading record, counts cited to log lines. | DO-178C change impact analysis. | Classes sum to candidates. | | | **Sessions and agents** | | | | | | | | Every turn is a session opened at start and closed by the gate; a refused turn released only against its journaled refusal and an unchanged tree. | Opener; closing gate; journal never removed. | A close without a session; a release against a changed tree. | SESSION nodes; journal. | 800-53 AC-12, AU-3. | Session chain and journal under the root. | | | A principal is registered once per key; identity is key + record. | Register uniqueness. | A second node for one key. | PRINCIPAL node; proofing record. | 800-53 IA-2/IA-4. | One node per key. | | | An agent's history and authority are recoverable at any past head. | Spoor; authorization hypergraph. | A packet or encounter without rule and head hashes. | Head chain; stamps; matrix edges. | 800-53 AU-10. | Rehydrate from root → same principal. | | | A hook that cannot read or write its state refuses; no fallback is silent; every payload validated against the pinned client's shape. | Hook reader with vendored shapes; state created only at the client's session start. | Absent, unreadable or unwritable state; malformed payload. | Shapes under the manifest; client pinned; cases. | 800-53 SI-10. | Shapes and pin under the root. | | | A shell write into a measured input is judged at the call. | Pre-tool gate over the measured set. | A write to a measured path outside an open licence. | Denial log; measured set. | 800-53 CM-5. | Measured set under the root. | | | **Gates and hygiene** | | | | | | | | The closing gate runs under the pinned interpreter, bytecode suppressed, stopping at the first refusal. | Interpreter by absolute path; ordered rules. | Another interpreter; bytecode in the tree; a skipped rule. | Hook commands; hygiene verdict. | DO-178C tool qualification. | Tool hashes in the verifier's pins. | | | No recipe or script drops an exit code outside a stated allow-list. | Hygiene case over Makefile and harness. | A dropped exit not allow-listed by file and line text. | Allow-list with reasons; the case. | 800-53 SI-11. | Case in the battery. | | | A verdict names the manifest it judged; the package accepts only a whole verdict for its own manifest. | Verdict record; acceptance by hash. | A subset run; another manifest; a changed byte after release. | Verdict record; accepted line. | DO-178C verification of the configured item. | Hash on the verdict line = root's manifest. | | | The battery runs in both tree states every round and at acceptance. | Rehearsed installation on scratch; the round refuses a one-state battery. | A missing state; N/M; any gate defect. | Two verdict lines per run. | 800-53 CA-2. | Both lines in the log. | | | **Supply chain and build** | | | | | | | | Every build input is named by version and hash in a measured file and fetched only against them. | Dependency registry with statements; image from pinned lock. | A floating input; a sentinel digest; an unregistered consumer. | Registry; lock. | 800-53 SR-3/SR-4, SA-10. | Registry under the root; lock hashes resolve. | | | Every identifier table refuses a duplicate at registration. | Uniqueness gate on every table. | Any duplicate. | Self-test line. | 800-53 IA-4. | Self-test in the battery. | | | **Installation and publication** | | | | | | | | An installation declares what it supplies; the declaration is the gate's own computation; every counted item has an install step. | Population gate; marker written by the gate. | A declaration differing from the tree; a typed value. | Marker; check line. | 800-53 PL-2, CM-6. | Marker = computed set. | | | An installation value never enters a template file. | Population beside the tree. | A template byte varying by installation. | Template root constant. | DO-178C parameter data items. | Root identical across installations. | | | The posted rule, head and clause are served first at every surface; every stamp carries their hashes; the head is anchored with two providers of two kinds in two jurisdictions. | Door; stamp format; anchor check; head policy. | The rule alone; a stamp without hashes; one provider. | Head chain; anchor receipts; stamps. | 800-53 AU-9/AU-10; RFC 3161 / eIDAS anchoring. | Head verifies signature → delegation → publisher. | | | Adoption of the Standard is a signed population record read by the derivation that labels the mark. | Adoption tool; provenance derivation. | A record whose source hash is not the vendored text's; an unregistered signer. | Adoption record; headers. | 42001 4.3, 5.2. | Record hash = framework meta's; signature verifies. | | | **Legal corpus** | | | | | | | | A proposition is depositary text located and hashed; a fact is signed by a proofed adjudicator within its evidence; sources are current to a cadence. | Cut-and-locate; signing refusal; currency gate. | Paraphrase; a fact outside evidence; a stale index. | Locator and hashes; signatures; cadence. | — | Locator resolves; signature verifies. | --- ## What the register holds at this note Measured on 2026-10-20 from the Engine's release as it sits in the Imperium record: tribunals-0.11.2, sha256 940fb9deeefebdc0972e20a831111923e0ebe09192eb904ac92c62bf56641614 (its parts and their sums are published with the number; 2,847 files). **The register of rule families** (`grounding/rule_families.json`, version 0.3.0, sha256 6920a967e324c59f562017692fbca6b14481a94614c904e33d22ba6da2f0327c) names eleven families, each tied to its authorities in the authority registry (12 authorities) and its sources in the source registry (2,582 sources): 1. UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules 1976 applicability 2. UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules 2010 applicability 3. UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules 2013 applicability 4. UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules 2021 applicability 5. UNCITRAL Expedited Arbitration Rules 2021 applicability 6. Domestic arbitration law with UNCITRAL Model Law lineage 7. New York Convention 1958 recognition/enforcement framework 8. UNCITRAL Rules on Transparency applicability 9. Mauritius Convention on Transparency applicability 10. 2026 UNCITRAL electronic-award Recommendation relevance 11. UNCITRAL 2026 Model Law revision routing **The instruments ingested** beyond these (`grounding/instruments.json`; 86 captures under `grounding/captures/`): the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, Additional Protocols I, II and III, the Rome Statute 1998 and the ICC Elements of Crimes, the United States Global Magnitsky Act, the United Kingdom Global Human Rights Sanctions Regulations 2020, Canada's Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, and the Swiss depositary's notifications under the Conventions and Protocols. Ingestion is the first of four steps. **The frontier.** The thirty-two families of the legacy engines — NIAC (6), Rome Statute Article 6 (2) and Article 7 (2), belligerent reprisal (6), command and superior responsibility (10), the accountability packages (6) — predate the depositary-text method and enter this Engine as inventory. The regrounding worksheet (`REGROUNDING-WORKSHEET.md`, sha256 9240796a69880013ea8515b7de314cee4dae33e7a8375c946623de7152c62745) sets the procedure per family: ingest the instrument's official bytes; cut the provisions by locator; write the case record's predicates against the propositions; tie the family's binding condition to the depositary status record; the Applicant's or counsel's ruling on the outcome mapping, recorded as a decision; the packet gate. Each family regrounded is a recorded decision and a new line in this note's successor. Until then the Engine does not answer on them: by its grammar, an un-regrounded family yields OUTSIDE_COMPETENCE or INDETERMINATE and never a finding. **The method is decided, not described.** The Engine's decisions register holds DEC-T-001 to DEC-T-014, among them: binding law only — a component rests on text in force for the respondent (DEC-T-001); non-binding texts excluded (DEC-T-002); the non-party outcome first-class, OUTSIDE_COMPETENCE (DEC-T-003); tier A is the depositary's or adopting body's bytes, reproductions not used (DEC-T-004); status under the Conventions and Protocols derived from the depositary's dated notifications (DEC-T-008); OCR never a derivation, no fact cited to a page image (DEC-T-009); an adjudicator a registered principal, human by identity, answerable for the method (DEC-T-012). ## What you will be able to check The published number and the checker appear at https://cohereon.io/records/ without notice; this page is updated when they do. Then, and not before, each claim below is verifiable by the means stated. | Claim | How you will check it | |---|---| | C1. Every proposition served is the depositary text's own words, located within its source. | The locator and hash resolve within the source under the published number; the verifier's regenerate-and-compare passes. | | C2. Every fact of record is signed by a named, proofed adjudicator and lies within its cited evidence. | The signature verifies against the registered principal; the registration carries the proofing record; the references resolve inside the evidence. | | C3. No source is served past its re-acquisition cadence. | The cadence is in the installation record; the currency gate is in the measured tree under the number. | | C4. Every packet carries the rule and head hashes current at issue; foreign, altered and rehearsal packets are refused. | The two hashes verify against the published rule and head; the refusals are in the measured directory code. | | C5. The corpus is the one the publisher signed, confirmable in independent custody. | `verify(artifact, root)` returns PASS; the root is signed under the publisher key; the verifier needs nothing from the operator. | | C6. An agent's identity and history are recoverable from the record at any past head, independently of any process. | The principal's registration, journaled sessions, stamped encounters and emitted packets verify under the same number; rehydration from them yields the same principal. | | C7. Every clause of IMP-COH-100 Part A is enforced by a named gate with its case in the battery, and the battery holds whole in both tree states. | The readiness record under the number lists each clause with its gate; the battery's two verdict lines are in the published run record. | **If you want to hold the checker.** At publication the checker and the signed pins are handed to custodians who are not us. A custodian holds the artifact and the number, runs the check, and records the result — announced or silent, as they choose. A custodian who announces is counted; one who stays silent is the reason the count is honest. If you want to be one, write to custodians@cohereon.io. Requests are acknowledged automatically on receipt and answered when the number is published; custodianship is confirmed by a signed record on this site, not by the acknowledgement. **Not claimed.** That the Engine interprets law. That its corpus extends beyond the families it names. That the families of international humanitarian law, international criminal law or the sanctions regimes are yet held as facts of record: their instruments are ingested and their families are inventory under the regrounding worksheet until each is regrounded, and on them the Engine answers OUTSIDE_COMPETENCE or INDETERMINATE by construction until then. That a fact of record resolves what an instrument leaves undefined. That any independent party has yet run the check. That boundary is what will make the rest checkable. This document's sha256 is published beside it: in the site manifest at /manifest.sha256 and in the Imperium record's index. ---