Regulating AI within the Human Rights Framework: A Roadmapping Methodology

The ongoing European debate on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly polarised between the initial ethics-based approach and the growing focus on human rights. Th e prevalence of one or the other of these two approaches is not neutral and entails consequences in terms of regulatory outcomes and underlying interests. Th e basic assumption of this study is the need to consider the pivotal role of ethics as a complementary element of a regulatory strategy , which must have human rights principles at its core. Based on this premise, this contribution focuses on the role that the international human rights framework can play in defining common binding principles for AI regulation. The first challenge in considering human rights as a frame of reference in AI regulation is to define the exact nature of the subject matter. Since a wide range of AI-based services and products have only emerged as a recent development of the digital economy, many of the existing international legal instruments are not tailored to the specific issues raised by AI. Moreover, certain binding principles and safeguards were shaped in a different technological era and social context. Against this background, we need to examine the existing binding international human rights instruments and their non-binding implementations to extract the key principles that should underpin AI development and govern its groundbreaking applications. However, the paradigm shift brought about by the latest wave of AI development means that the principles embodied in international legally binding instruments cannot be applied in their current form, and this contribution sets out to contextualise these guiding principles for the AI era. Given the broad application of AI solutions in a variety of fields, we might look at the entire corpus of available international binding instruments. However, taking a methodological approach, this analysis focuses on two key areas – data protection and healthcare – to provide an initial assessment of the regulatory issues and a possible roadmap to addressing them.