Across six sessions, one conviction emerged from the discussions: AI can genuinely strengthen justice systems, but only if human rights, judicial independence and access to justice are built into its design from the start. Dr Kamel El Hilali presented UNESCO’s AI and Rule of Law Programme and highlighted the initiatives designed to help judiciaries worldwide navigate this transition while remaining in control.
AI is already changing how legal professionals work, and initiatives like the Thomson Reuters / UNESCO AI Company Data Initiative help build a clearer evidence base on how the technology is being used across the legal sector. Panelists also warned that these same tools, when poorly designed or uncritically relied upon, risk compounding the very injustices they promise to fix.
One of the seminar’s clearest warnings came from Margaret Satterthwaite, UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, who cautioned against “techno-solutionism”, the assumption that AI tools can substitute for, rather than support, judicial reasoning and human judgement. The point was reinforced by a recurring concern that training and resourcing for judges and lawyers are not keeping pace with the technology they are being asked to adopt. Persistent gaps in judicial training on AI represent a structural risk to independence and accountability, not merely a technical shortfall to be solved with better tools. Several sessions focused on oversight. Panelists agreed that civil society — from digital rights organizations to unions and academia — is becoming an essential counterweight to the pace of AI adoption in legal and judicial settings, particularly where formal regulation is still catching up. Because AI justice risks—like bias and opacity—are global, accountability frameworks cannot be designed by any single region alone. Newly issued professional guidance from the Bar Standards Board, the Commonwealth Lawyers Association and the International Bar Association was discussed as an early, concrete step in that direction.
Can AI finally close long-standing gaps in legal access for underserved communities? The seminar’s closing session tackled this critical question. Panelists warned that without strict safeguards and digital literacy, technology could worsen existing inequalities. Whether AI bridges or widens the justice gap depends on our choices today—not the technology itself.
The seminar, co-convened by Dr. Kamel El Hilali (UNESCO) and Dr. Louise Loder (BHRC/University of Exeter), builds on UNESCO’s ongoing work with judiciaries worldwide, including the Guidelines for the Use of AI in Courts and Tribunals, and echoes a conviction expressed at the conference on judiciary resilience in the AI era held at UNESCO on 16 July 2026: technology must serve justice, and never the other way around. BHRC and UNESCO will publish a full post-event report with recommendations in the coming months.
READ MORE: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-human-rights-and-rule-law-global-debate-london?hub=701
