Euractiv – EU’s much-heralded AI Act agreed by EU Parliament – but serious human rights holes in law remain

This op-ed – authored by CDT Europe’s Laura Lazaro Cabrera – first appeared in Euractiv on March 13, 2024. A portion of the text has been pasted below.

For those such as CDT Europe who have been advocating hard for human rights to be at the core of the AI Act, we had high hopes, but the final text has given away too much in the last-ditch negotiations.

Whilst we can rightly celebrate that privacy and other fundamental rights are foregrounded in the law, there are too many exemptions which could lead to harmful AI posing serious risks to citizens and indeed, often to those in vulnerable situations.

One glaring failure, in our view, is that whilst the Act brings in important limitations on the use of AI by law enforcement, lawmakers did not heed our warning (and that of other civil society organisations) calling for a total ban on untargeted facial recognition by law enforcement.

This goes to the heart of what kind of society we want to live in. The limitations on the use of live facial recognition only apply to law enforcement use in publicly accessible spaces, and explicitly exclude borders, which are known sites of human rights abuse.

This is a law which is supposed to protect people’s most basic human rights and yet it seems to be allowing, through its exemptions, the most nefarious kind of AI, one which invades the right to privacy of often the most marginalised and vulnerable groups.

Read the full op-ed in Euractiv.