We want to establish the "braided action" (defined in the paper) of the DHR category on a universal environment algebra as a complete invariant for completely rational chiral conformal quantum field theories. The environment algebra can either be a single local algebra, or the quasilocal algebra, both of which are model-independent up to isomorphism. The DHR category as an abstract structure is captured by finitely many data (superselection sectors, fusion, and braiding), whereas its braided action encodes the full dynamical information that distinguishes models with isomorphic DHR categories. We show some geometric properties of the "duality pairing" between local algebras and the DHR category which are valid in general (completely rational) chiral CFTs. Under some additional assumptions whose status remains to be settled, the braided action of its DHR category completely classifies a (prime) CFT. The approach does not refer to the vacuum representation, or the knowledge of the vacuum state.