CEN-CENELEC JTC 24 Explained

Regulation (EU) 2024/1781 requires a Digital Product Passport without specifying what one is in engineering terms. That gap is deliberate: regulation sets objectives and standardisation supplies the technical detail, which can then be revised without reopening the law.

CEN-CENELEC Joint Technical Committee 24 is where that detail is being written, which makes it the most consequential body most passport programmes have never looked at.

What is JTC 24?

It works under a standardisation request from the European Commission, which is the formal mechanism by which a regulation asks for the standards it depends on. That request defines the deliverables and the deadlines.

Why harmonised standards matter

A harmonised standard cited in the Official Journal carries presumption of conformity. A product built to it is presumed to satisfy the corresponding legal requirement, which shifts the burden of proof in an inspection decisively.

The alternative is demonstrating compliance by your own route, which is permitted and considerably harder. In practice most manufacturers will follow the harmonised standard for exactly this reason, which is why its content matters more than its status as a voluntary document suggests.

What is in scope?

The third and fourth rows are the ones that decide whether passports are genuinely portable. If exchange and access are standardised, a regulator can read any manufacturer’s passport with one client; if they are not, every implementation becomes its own integration.

How does it relate to GS1 and W3C work?

It builds on them rather than replacing them. GS1 Digital Link provides a resolvable identifier syntax, EPCIS 2.0 provides an event vocabulary, and W3C Verifiable Credentials provide a signature model. JTC 24 specifies how these are used together for the passport.

That is the sensible outcome and it was not guaranteed. A committee inventing a parallel identifier scheme would have produced something incompatible with the barcodes already on products, and the decision to build on existing standards is why GS1 Digital Link work done now is unlikely to be wasted.

What about the international dimension?

The committee mirrors related ISO activity so that European standards can align with international ones. This matters because the passport is a requirement for products placed on the EU market, most of which are made elsewhere.

A manufacturer in another region needs a specification they can implement once, not a European variant of something they already do. Alignment is what prevents the passport becoming a technical barrier to trade in substance while being framed as a product requirement.

The timing problem

Standards development runs slower than legislation, and the sequence is uncomfortable. The framework regulation exists, delegated acts are being drafted, and the standards that define technical compliance are still in progress.

Manufacturers are therefore asked to prepare against a requirement whose technical form is not final. The practical response is to do work that is robust to the outcome — accurate data, resolvable identity, signed supplier evidence — and to defer decisions that depend on unpublished detail.

How do you follow the work?

• National standards bodies mirror the committee and admit members, which is the direct route.
• Draft standards are circulated for public comment at defined stages.
• Industry associations frequently hold seats and brief members.
• Published deliverables appear through national bodies rather than free of charge.

Participation through a national body is the only route that offers influence rather than observation, and it costs staff time rather than fees in most countries. For a manufacturer whose product group is early in the delegated act sequence, that is usually justified.

What should you do while it is open?

Build against the underlying standards rather than against a specific product implementation. GS1 identifiers, EPCIS events and W3C credentials are the components JTC 24 is assembling, and work invested in them survives whatever assembly is chosen.

Avoid committing to a vendor-specific data model that cannot be re-expressed. The risk in this period is not choosing the wrong standard; it is choosing something that is not a standard at all and discovering later that it does not map.