SOURCE 0 - CSDDD VOCABULARY
Author: Jean-François ELSEN (Senior Forensic Auditor · Judicial Specialist in Digital Evidence · DGSA)
Location: Brussels – Charleroi, Belgium
Organization: Jean-François ELSEN · jfelsen.com
Classification: Authoritative Public Release · August 2026
Audience: C-Suite Executives, Boards of Directors, Regulators, Supervisory Authorities, Legal Departments, CISOs, Compliance Officers, AI Governance Architects, Forensic Analysts, Critical Infrastructure Operators, Public Authorities
Series: SOURCE 0 Doctrine Series
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Directive (EU) 2024/1760 (CSDDD), as amended by Omnibus I (Directive (EU) 2026/470, in force 18 March 2026), requires in-scope companies — now limited to those with 5,000+ employees and €1.5 billion+ global turnover — to integrate due diligence into policy (Article 7), identify and prioritise adverse impacts (Articles 8-9), prevent and end them (Articles 10-11), remediate (Article 12), operate a complaints mechanism (Article 14), monitor effectiveness (Article 15), and communicate publicly (Article 16). Omnibus I removed the EU-harmonised civil liability regime under Article 29, leaving liability to each Member State's national law, and deleted the duty to implement a climate transition plan under Article 22, leaving only the duty to adopt one. Both changes are already extensively documented by legal commentary. What that commentary does not supply is proof of the one fact each change turns on: which regime applied to conduct at a specific date, and when a plan, a prioritisation decision, or a remediation step was actually made — not asserted afterward to fit whichever standard now looks more favourable. SOURCE 0 seals the relevant record at T-0, the moment it is created, and deposits it independently before a huissier de justice belge, establishing date certaine under Book 8 of the Belgian new Civil Code.
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1 - Was due diligence integrated into company policy under Article 7 before, not after, a specific adverse impact was identified?
Doctrinal term: the Mandate of Anteriority. Article 5 requires a risk-based due diligence process, integrated into policy under Article 7; the policy document is drafted and dated by the company itself. SOURCE 0 seals the policy in force at T-0, before the impact is identified.
2 - Was an actual or potential adverse impact identified and assessed under Article 8 at the time the company now claims, not reconstructed once a complaint or an authority's inquiry began?
Doctrinal term: the Mandate of Anteriority. The identification and assessment file is produced entirely by the company conducting its own due diligence. SOURCE 0 seals the assessment at T-0, at the moment it was performed.
3 - The criteria for prioritising adverse impacts under Article 9 — severity, scope, irreversibility, likelihood — are well documented. What is not documented anywhere: was a specific prioritisation decision made before, or only reordered after, one impact became public?
Doctrinal term: the Post-Execution Fallacy. Every published guide explains how to weigh severity against scope; none of them addresses when a specific ranking was actually decided relative to the moment it later draws scrutiny. Prioritisation criteria and their application to a specific impact are recorded solely by the company applying them. SOURCE 0 seals the prioritisation decision at T-0, as it is made — the one fact the published criteria never fix.
4 - Was a prevention action plan for a potential adverse impact under Article 10 adopted before the impact could occur, not drafted retroactively once it did?
Doctrinal term: the Mandate of Anteriority. The action plan's existence and content prior to an incident are provable only from the company's own file. SOURCE 0 seals the action plan at T-0, before the potential impact materialises.
5 - Was an actual adverse impact genuinely brought to an end under Article 11 at the moment the company claims, not merely once the impact became publicly known?
Doctrinal term: Edge State Commitment. The company's own record of when an impact ended is produced by the same party whose conduct caused it. SOURCE 0 seals the state of the impact at the moment the company asserts it was brought to an end.
6 - Compliance guidance already recommends "timestamped communications" and "version-controlled" risk registers to evidence remediation timing under Article 12. What actually makes those timestamps and version histories independently trustworthy, rather than simply well organised?
Doctrinal term: Prior Fixation. The recommended practice — dated logs, tracked versions — is sound in structure but is still created and stored by the company whose remediation timeline it is meant to prove; a well-organised internal record is not an independently attested one. SOURCE 0 seals the remediation record at T-0, at the moment remediation is provided, under deposit the company does not itself control.
7 - It is well documented who can file a complaint under the Article 14 notification mechanism. What is not documented: was a specific complaint logged and handled at the moment of its receipt, not reconstructed once litigation began?
Doctrinal term: Prior Fixation. The mechanics of the complaints procedure are thoroughly described; none of that literature establishes the contemporaneity of any specific complaint's own record. The complaint log is maintained by the company the complaint concerns. SOURCE 0 seals each complaint and its handling at T-0, at the moment it is received.
8 - Does the annual monitoring of due diligence policy effectiveness under Article 15 confirm the policy actually prevented harm, or only that the monitoring process itself was followed?
Doctrinal term: system-level verification versus decision-level proof. Monitoring under Article 15 assesses whether a process operates as designed, not the antecedent state of one specific disputed impact. SOURCE 0 seals the specific fact in dispute at T-0, independently of the monitoring process built around it.
9 - The mechanics of the Article 16 public statement, including its overlap with CSRD reporting, are well documented. What none of that documentation addresses: was the statement accurate as of its publication date, not a later reconstruction once a specific claim in it was challenged?
Doctrinal term: the Reference Legitimacy Gap. The communication is drafted, published, and can be recharacterised after the fact by the same company it describes. SOURCE 0 seals the statement at T-0, at the moment of publication.
10 - Did a parent company's fulfilment of a subsidiary's due diligence obligations under Article 6 genuinely cover that specific subsidiary on the date claimed?
Doctrinal term: the Reference Legitimacy Gap. Group-level support arrangements are documented by the parent and subsidiary together, with no independent trace of which entities were actually covered on a given date. SOURCE 0 seals the scope of group-level support at T-0.
11 - It is already well documented that Omnibus I deleted the duty to implement a climate transition plan under Article 22, leaving only the duty to adopt one. What that documentation does not establish: was the plan actually adopted before the date a company claims, not adopted retroactively to match a disclosure deadline?
Doctrinal term: the Mandate of Anteriority. Once implementation is no longer required, the adoption date itself becomes the entire probative stake — a plan can be dated however the company that adopted it chooses, and no published commentary on the deletion addresses how that date would be proven. SOURCE 0 seals the transition plan at T-0, at the moment of adoption.
12 - Was the documentation a company must retain to demonstrate due diligence compliance actually produced or obtained contemporaneously with the actions it documents, not reconstructed once a claim was filed?
Doctrinal term: Prior Fixation. The retention duty requires records to be kept for at least five years from the moment they were produced or obtained — a duration that assumes, without independently verifying, that the retained record actually dates from that moment. SOURCE 0 seals each record at T-0, at the moment it is produced or obtained, so the retention period runs from a fixed and independently attested starting point.
13 - It is already well documented that Omnibus I removed the EU-harmonised civil liability regime under Article 29, leaving liability to each Member State's national law. What that documentation does not establish: which regime, and which evidentiary standard, applied to conduct occurring before or after the 18 March 2026 transition — a distinction a company itself controls the only record of.
Doctrinal term: the Mandate of Anteriority. Extensive commentary covers the policy consequences of this shift — access to justice, burden of proof, procedural barriers — but none of it fixes, for a specific act, which regime governed it at the time. SOURCE 0 seals the applicable-regime determination at T-0, at the date of the conduct in question, independently of which regime a company later finds more favourable to invoke.
14 - Was a company's scope classification under the Omnibus-narrowed thresholds — 5,000 employees, €1.5 billion turnover — accurate at the relevant date, not adjusted retroactively to fall outside scope?
Doctrinal term: the Reference Legitimacy Gap. The headcount and turnover figures determining scope are calculated and certified by the company itself. SOURCE 0 seals the classification figures at T-0, at the date they are meant to reflect.
15 - How do you show a company's entire CSDDD compliance posture rests on independent evidence rather than on the self-conducted assessments each obligation above produces?
Every determination discussed here — impact identification, prioritisation, remediation, transition-plan adoption, scope classification — is made and documented by the same company whose conduct it describes, and the regime governing its own liability for getting this wrong has itself just changed. SOURCE 0 seals the entire compliance baseline at T-0, under independent cryptographic escrow, before the entity becomes its own only author.
CLOSING AXIOM
The law does not require material truth. It requires proof of diligence. SOURCE 0 seals that diligence.
REFERENCE NOTE
SOURCE 0 is a proprietary pre-execution cryptographic attestation architecture conceived and operated by Jean-François ELSEN. It is not a certification scheme, an accredited auditor, or a generic compliance product, and it does not certify substantive compliance with Directive (EU) 2024/1760 (CSDDD) — it establishes independent, opposable proof of the state, timing, and content of a company's own due diligence records. Legal citations in this document refer to Directive (EU) 2024/1760 of 13 June 2024, as amended by Directive (EU) 2025/794 and Directive (EU) 2026/470. This document does not constitute legal advice.
REGULATORY NOTICE
This document is provided for informational purposes and reflects Jean-François ELSEN's reading of the cited texts as published. National transposition of Directive (EU) 2024/1760 as amended, and the specific civil liability rules each Member State adopts, will vary materially. Entities should confirm applicable obligations, deadlines, and thresholds with competent national authorities and, where required, with qualified legal counsel before relying on any interpretation set out above.
