Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology which is predicted to have a decisive, potentially disruptive impact on how we live our lives as individuals, how societies are organised and how economies will develop in Europe and elsewhere in the world. As a technology which is still under development, AI has been expected to generate significant socio-economic benefits. However, it has also been associated with substantive risks and potential harms for contemporary individual and collective values, for current social and political institutions, and for the present way of life in European countries and beyond. The predicted or already visible risks and harms of the technology have prompted calls for its regulation – including its regulation in law – with the purpose of subjecting AI as well as its impact to socio-political control.

In the European legal space, the control of AI through law and regulation has adopted a distinct ethical focus aiming to address – primarily and as a precondition of further detailed regulation – the ethical and the fundamental rights challenges of the technology. Within the European Union, human-centred, ethical AI has emerged as the central buzzword in policy-making and regulation, which however became burdened with multiple, sometimes conflicting objectives and priorities. While the concern of European policy for common human values and the protection of fundamental rights seems genuine, the regulation and the legal control of AI have become entangled with the particular objectives of EU and national industrial policy, security policy and geopolitics, and with the protection of European and national technology sovereignty in global technological and economic competition.

With concrete measures of legal regulation in the pipeline in Europe, it appears that the regulatory control of AI – or at least of current, AI-related technologies – is a settled matter in the European legal space. However, the aim of controlling the technology and its development at present – considering in particular the complexity of the objectives and priorities pursued simultaneously by European policy-making – requires a careful assessment, which necessitates in turn an equally careful legal examination of individual present and prospective regulatory measures. The opportunity to control the technology now – irrespective of the importance of the values and other interests protected – may undermine technological development and may thus frustrate achieving the benefits associated with the technology in the future. In contrast, a delayed, hesitant legal control may put values, rights and concrete interests in jeopardy without a possibility in the future to reverse or remedy the damages thus caused.

The conference aims to give a platform for a critical, contextually oriented analysis and discussion of present and prospective legal regulation of AI and its impact in Europe, and of the need for such regulation and for further regulation in general. We would like to focus on three issues in particular:

• the justifiability and the suitability of the developing EU regulatory landscape;

• the legal challenges of the use of Automated Decision-Making (ADM) solutions in the judicial process;

• data bias and data discrimination.

Application: The organisers invite the submission of conference papers from PhD students, academics and experts working in the area covered by the call. Papers critically analysing the relevant regulatory and policy developments in the EU, in the Council of Europe, or in individual or multiple European states will be given preference.

Abstracts of maximum 500-words should be sent by April 15th 2022 to Márton Varju: varju.marton@tk.hu.

The organisers plan to publish the best conference papers in a special issue of a recognised international law journal.

The term ‘International Judiciary’ usually refers to those bodies formally constituted by international law as courts and tribunals with the power to render decisions binding upon parties. Included therein are a wide range of permanently constituted international courts and tribunals as well as arbitral tribunals, especially in the field of investment protection. While the proliferation of international courts and tribunals keeps international lawyers occupied, what may be relatively understudied is the status and practices of dispute settlement bodies whose function may well be understood as (quasi-) judicial, but which are not formally labelled as courts and tribunals.

In analyzing the de-formalization of the international judiciary, we want to go beyond the relatively static definition of the international judiciary that we have worked with in the last decades. We want to outline new dynamics and, perhaps, explore new borders of the international judiciary. This would include new functions and practices in ‘classical’ international courts and tribunals, but also the activities of ‘new players’ such as atypical quasi judicial bodies, and, more generally, new forms of dispute settlement.

Take, for instance, Facebook’s Oversight Board (known as the ‘Supreme Court’) as an example. While it is not labelled as a judicial body, the Board applies international human rights law in order to (legally) assess actions to be taken by the company. The Board is supposed to be an independent body, whose decisions are binding upon Facebook. Against this background, the Interest Group invites paper proposals which facilitate the functional understanding of the judiciary at the international level.

The Interest Group particularly welcomes proposals that address: - the conceptual or theoretical analysis of international judicial functions; - the status and function of so-called quasi-judicial bodies; - legitimacy of quasi-judicial bodies; - relations between formal courts and tribunals and quasi-judicial bodies.

In recent years, the development of AI systems aimed at supporting clinical decisions has greatly expanded, employing a wide range of techniques, such as machine learning and deep learning. AI systems are used for a variety of applications, such as diagnosis, personalized medicine, triage assessment, disease prevention and monitoring, and drug development. In some areas, such as radiology, the performance of AI systems has even surpassed that of humans.

However, the biomedical field is also a sector in which complaints, litigation, criminal charges for medical malpractice, and administrative fines are increasing worldwide, therefore special attention should be paid to legal issues that may arise from the use of AI systems. AI systems may, in fact, have a significant legal impact on multiple stakeholders: researchers, producers, health care professionals, patients, and society as a whole. From a legal point of view, the whole AI life cycle generates the need for regulatory and ethical compliance. Because of the fact that health data, which are considered special categories of data according to art. 9 of GDPR, are involved, privacy compliance, including correct anonymization pursuant to the Working Party 29’s guidelines of 2014, is a key issue. In addition, due to the known issues regarding discrimination in health care, the ethical assessment is also extremely important.

At a global level, there is a call for the development of Trustworthy AI systems, which is particularly important in the biomedical field. As highlighted by the High-Level Expert Group on AI set up by the European Commission, “Trustworthy AI has three components, which should be met throughout the system's entire life cycle: it should be lawful, complying with all applicable laws and regulations; it should be ethical, ensuring adherence to ethical principles and values; and it should be robust, both from a technical and social perspective, since, even with good intentions, AI systems can cause unintentional harm”. Some scholars have even pushed the debate further, advocating for explainability and interpretability for all systems employed in the healthcare sector, thus considering black-box approaches not compliant with ethical and legal standards.

This Special Session aims at gathering scholars who are investigating new directions and ideas in the field of AI and Law, in particular in the biomedical field.

The ESIL Interest Group on International Organizations welcomes submissions for the interest group workshop taking place as part of the ESIL Annual Conference on Thursday 1 September 2022, 09.00-12.00, in Janskerkhof 3, Utrecht, The Netherlands.

International organizations, elites, and masses: perspectives on in/exclusion

The question of inclusion in world institutions has been a persistent object of inquiry in international law and international relations. Typically these address questions such as who should be included in decision making or who should be present in meetings or conferences. Thus, many accounts have often focused on what some perceive ‘a head-counting exercise’: a certain number of women (or women of color) being included in a decision-making body or numbers of indigenous representatives traveling to the headquarters of international organizations (IOs) – numbers that anyway continue to be less than impressive. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which IOs and international experts promote orders that fail to serve the interests of masses or are devised to contain anti-systemic movements that might endanger the status quo. IOs do so, at times, by setting standards/promoting policies for ‘ideal life’, ‘healthy economy’ or ‘model state’ that often obscures and may even reinforce structural disparity in local and global orders. At the same time there is often an empowerment of global and local elites and disconnect from the masses from the potential of internationalist actions.

For the 2022 ESIL Annual Meeting, we call for papers that discuss different pathways of inquiry into IOs and the making of local and global elites.

A digitalizáció teljesen újnak tekinthető, a szexuális önrendelkezési jog elleni támadásokat hívott életre, továbbá számos, korábban is előforduló, hasonló jellegű jogsértés elterjedését katalizálta. Jelen munka ezek közül négy esetkör: a deepfake, a revenge porn, az upskirting és a cyberflashing bemutatására és értékelésére vállalkozik. A tanulmány a vonatkozó külhoni szabályozások és joggyakorlat bemutatását követően de lege ferenda javaslatokat fogalmaz meg a hazai törvényhozás számára.

Opponens: Prof. Szomora Zsolt egyetemi tanár, SZTE-ÁJTK Bűnügyi Tudományok Intézete

Opponens: Gárdos-Orosz Fruzsina

A vitát vezeti: Pozsár-Szentmiklósy Zoltán

A tudományos műhelyvita-sorozat szakmai vezetője Dezső Márta professzor emerita.

Opponensek: Kollarics Flóra és Polgári Eszter

A vitát vezeti: Dezső Márta

A tudományos műhelyvita-sorozat szakmai vezetője Dezső Márta professzor emerita.