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REFUSAL_AUTHORITY_CONTRACT.md

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Refusal Authority Contract (AUTHORITATIVE)

Decision date: 2025-12-17

Summary

  • This contract establishes an authoritative mapping from REFUSAL gate identifiers (e.g., G2_GOVERNANCE_PRESENCE_CHECK) to named refusal authorities (e.g., governance, persona, infrastructure).
  • Every REFUSAL event emitted by the engine MUST include structured refusal metadata in its evidence.refusal object with keys: authority, trigger, scope, and justification.

Requirements

  • The codebase provides a deterministic map in src/shieldcraft/services/governance/refusal_authority.py.
  • The helper record_refusal_event(context, gate_id, phase, ...) must be used to record REFUSALs at known gates and attaches the required refusal metadata.
  • The finalization boundary (finalize_checklist) asserts that any REFUSAL in the finalized events includes a valid, non-empty authority string and surfaces the authority as checklist.refusal_authority.

Rationale

  • Explicit authority attribution enables auditability, makes REFUSALs inspectable by automated tools, and reduces ambiguity in governance decisions.
  • Structured refusal metadata enables paired diagnostics for missing authority cases and deterministic diagnostics masking.

Enforcement

  • Code-level assertions validate presence and type of authority during checklist finalization.
  • Unit tests (tests/test_refusal_authority.py) cover normal and failure modes.
  • CI guards must include tests/ci/test_refusal_authority_persistence.py to ensure the authoritative map covers known REFUSAL gates used by the engine.

Scope

  • This contract is AUTHORITATIVE for REFUSAL metadata assignment. Any future edits to gate→authority mappings require an explicit decision recorded in docs/governance/decision_log.md.

Owners

  • Governance (docs/governance)