Civil society groups urge EU to prioritise fundamental rights in AI regulation

Over 110 civil society organisations have laid out proposals to strengthen the protection of fundamental rights in the European Commission’s Artificial Intelligence Act. The statement, drafted by European Digital Rights (EDRi), Access Now, AlgorithmWatch, and others, outlines several recommendations. Among them is a call to introduce robust mechanisms to deal with unacceptable and limited-risk AI systems and to include explicit obligations on users (deployers) of high-risk AI systems, such as the obligation to conduct human rights impact assessments. Another recommendation is to place prohibitions on all AI systems posing an unacceptable risk to fundamental rights, for instance by (a) expanding the prohibition on social scoring to also apply to harmful social profiling practices, and (b) expanding the prohibition on remote biometric identification to apply to all actors, not just law enforcement, as well as to both real-time and post uses.