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Judicial operators worldwide continue a Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law
Currently over 4300 judicial operators from 139 countries are registered for the course in seven languages.
On 21 April 2022, participants of the MOOC interacted with course lecturers Nicolas Economou, Chair of the Law & Society Initiative, The Future Society, Tatiana Jereissati, Coordinator of Sectoral Studies and Qualitative Methods, CETIC.br|NIC.br, and Ameen Jauhar, Senior Resident Fellow and Lead of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Professor Fabricio Ataides Braz, AI Lab, University of Brasilia, delivered the keynote talk 鈥溾.
The interactive and open peer-to-peer discussion between judicial operators and MOOC participants from around the world, covered important topics such as data protection, AI-based judicial decision-making, the role of human oversight and the need to integrate the judiciary in discussions around AI programming.
This discussion is timely even as AI systems become more widely used. For example, some judicial systems have adopted Criminal Risk Assessment algorithms to help determine if someone should be detained. Whereas this is a widely used practice, there is actually little evidence that it serves the purpose that it is intended to advance.
That said, there are also positive use cases of AI in the judiciary. Professor Fabricio Ataides Braz, AI Lab, University of Brasilia, noted that none of the AI programs used in the Brazilian Judiciary directly interfere with the judge鈥檚 process of decision-making. 鈥淭hey remove many bottlenecks and help the justice system to flow,鈥 he said in his opening keynote remarks.
The use of data was a key theme in the discussion, with questions from judicial operators about data privacy and bias. 鈥淚t is hard to remove coded biases from legacy or historical data because the data sets are already set," said Ameen Jauhar. As for data that is now being collected, we must now make sure it is diverse in the collection protocol and not biased or prejudicial to a certain community, he said.
On the use of AI models, it is fundamental that we think of metrics not only in terms of accuracy and other technical aspects, but that we have diverse and multi-disciplinary teams that consider respect for human rights and cultural values.
With this flagship MOOC on AI and the Rule of Law, UNESCO is building on the Global Judges鈥 Initiative to fostering peer to peer knowledge exchange, training, and capacity-building for judicial operators worldwide.
