If a customer, a customs officer and a retailer scan the same product in three countries, UNTP lets all three read the same claim. The United Nations Transparency Protocol is an open UN/CEFACT specification for publishing product data, conformity claims and traceability events as verifiable credentials. It is not a law and sets no deadline.
Key takeaways
A format, not a regulation: UNTP says how product data is expressed and verified. Deadlines and penalties come from the laws that adopt it.
Three credentials: a Digital Product Passport for the product, a Digital Conformity Credential per certified claim, a Digital Traceability Event per step. All three are W3C Verifiable Credentials.
Identifiers you already own: UNTP resolves products through web-addressable identifiers such as GS1 Digital Link, the same mechanism the EU passport uses.
UN/CEFACT adopted Recommendation No. 49 in 2024; sector profiles for batteries, critical minerals, agriculture and textiles are in field tests.
What is UNTP?
UN/CEFACT, the UN body that maintains trade-data standards, wrote UNTP with governments, industry groups and standards bodies including GS1. Its goal is narrow. When a product carries a claim such as "recycled content 40%", the claim should travel with the product as data. A customs system, a retailer or a customer can then check it without calling anyone.
It uses three building blocks. The Digital Product Passport holds the product's identity and attributes. A Digital Conformity Credential is issued by a certifier or test lab for one claim and names the standard behind it. A Digital Traceability Event records one step, a shipment or a transformation, with parties, place and time. Each is a signed JSON document whose issuer can be checked.
A shared vocabulary makes a fibre composition or a facility identifier mean the same thing to every reader. A discovery rule takes a scanned identifier to its credentials. The UN Transparency Protocol sits with the laws in the regulation guides because those laws can point to it.
UNTP and the EU Digital Product Passport: how the two relate
The EU Digital Product Passport under ESPR is a legal duty with fields set per product group and its own registry. UNTP is one candidate format for expressing that data. The European standardisation work in CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 uses the same building blocks: web-resolvable identifiers, machine-readable attributes, verifiable claims.
For a brand the relationship is practical. Product data held as structured, identified, source-linked records can be published in whatever schema the EU act requires, and in UNTP form for markets that adopt it. Data held as PDFs in email threads can be published as neither. The GS1 Digital Link identifier on the product serves both.
The battery passport is the first live case: the Global Battery Alliance implementation uses UNTP credentials, and the EU battery passport rules apply from 18 February 2027.
What UNTP means for brands
Nothing to do this quarter, and one decision to get right. There is no UNTP deadline, and most suppliers will not issue credentials themselves for years. The decision is whether the product data you collect now is structured enough to become credentials later.
- Identify products with a resolvable identifier: a GS1 GTIN written as a Digital Link URL serves the EU passport, UNTP and the retailer's scanner.
- Keep each claim with its evidence: a "recycled" claim points at the transaction certificate, its issuer and its standard. That is a conformity credential in everything but the signature.
- Record supply chain steps as events, not paragraphs: supplier, facility, date, quantity, per purchase order.
Tappr passports carry a GS1 Digital Link identifier and hold each claim with its source document attached. The data can be issued in UNTP form when a market asks for it. Until a market asks, nothing on your side changes.