The core is universal, the modules name their country
The mechanics of a letter that gets an answer do not change from one country to the next. What changes is the law you can invoke: it comes in separately, under the name of the country it applies to.
The doctrine
Why the core cites no law
Identifying the right recipient, dating the facts, saying what you rely on, asking for one precise thing, setting a deadline, keeping the proof, following up: these moves get a letter answered in Dakar as much as in Lyon. They depend on no code, no administration, no legal system. That is why they form the core, and that is why the core templates cite no law.
A core template therefore speaks in terms of roles: “the department that made the decision”, “the organisation holding your data”, “the professional seller”. Never the name of an administration, never an article number. That may look less precise. It is in fact more honest: a letter citing an article that does not apply in the country it is posted from is weaker than a letter citing none.
The core is not a stripped-down version waiting for the modules. It is the part that holds good longest, and the part that never goes out of date.
A legal reference you cannot check at its source does not make a letter stronger: it makes it open to attack.
How it works
What a country module has to declare
A module is one more template, filed in the same family as its universal counterpart, with two extra obligations. The first: it says which country it applies to, and that mention appears everywhere the template appears, in the index as much as in the workshop. The second: each of its legal references carries its public address and the date on which it was read.
The five conditions of entry
- The country is named, plainly. Not a region, not a union of states, not “French-speaking”: the country where the text was checked as applicable.
- Every reference carries its exact number, its official public address, and the date it was read.
- Every reference was opened at that address, on that day. A reference copied from another site does not count, even if it is correct.
- The template says when it does NOT apply: a private sale, another country, a special regime. That is half of what it is worth.
- Its universal counterpart already exists, and the module points back to it for the cases it does not cover.
A template with even one reference that cannot be checked does not go out. That is not editorial caution, it is a lock: publication is refused if a legal ground has no source and no date, and refused too if a core template starts citing national law. The two mistakes are mirror images, and both damage the same thing.
The state of coverage
What exists so far, counted on disk
15
letter templates, core and modules together
1
countries covered by at least one module
16
legal references checked against their public source, with their date
8
families of letters, every one served by at least one template
What that means
Narrow coverage, and that is not an admission
The national coverage of the collection can be read in the figure above, and it is deliberately small. This is the order in which the project grows: the core first, because it serves everyone straight away, then the modules, one country at a time, at the pace at which the texts can be opened at source and read.
A site announcing thirty countries covered by copying summaries found elsewhere would be more impressive and less useful. Every reference in this collection was opened at its official address on the day it was written, and that date is shown on the template sheet, next to the link. A legal ground that is a year old will say so, rather than keeping quiet about its age.
Proposing a country
A module is built with somebody who knows the country's law and can point to the texts. The useful work is not writing the letter, which already exists in the core: it is naming the two or three articles that strengthen it, and saying where they can be read freely. The rest is mechanical.
- See the modules already written their scope is stated on every card
- The sources and the dates they were read
- Propose a country or a text
- Report an out-of-date reference a text changes, and a site that does not notice lies without knowing it