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🇨🇭 Switzerland /Technology

Should artificial intelligence be banned from judicial decisions? The question is being raised in Bern

From Le Temps · () French

Translated from French and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

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  • Swiss National Councillor Raphaël Mahaim has filed a parliamentary initiative seeking procedural changes to ensure that judges retain control over judicial decision-making.
  • The Greens politician and lawyer argues that voluntary good practices on artificial intelligence may not adequately prevent abuses in court proceedings.
  • Switzerland has not reached the level of automation tested in Taiwan and Estonia, but the prospect of AI-generated or semi-automated decisions is no longer considered science fiction.

Could artificial intelligence one day help write, or even shape, court judgments in Switzerland? The question has reached the Federal Assembly through a parliamentary initiative filed at the beginning of September by Raphaël Mahaim, a Green Party national councillor from Vaud and a lawyer by profession.

Mahaim is calling for changes to procedural laws so that the decision-making process itself remains in the hands of judges. His aim is to protect what he describes as the core of justice, its “noble task”, from the influence of an increasingly pervasive technology. “The power to judge is conferred by humans on other humans; that is the foundation of the social contract,” he says.

Switzerland is still far from the experiments under way elsewhere. Taiwan is testing artificial intelligence to generate complete draft decisions in drunk-driving and fraud cases. Estonia, meanwhile, handles small civil monetary claims in a semi-automated manner.

Yet the idea of a robot-generated verdict no longer belongs entirely to science fiction in Switzerland. Mahaim’s initiative reflects concern that procedural safeguards should define the limits of AI in the courts, rather than relying only on recommended practices. The issue now moves into the political debate in Bern, where lawmakers will have to consider how much room the technology should receive in judicial proceedings.

The power to judge is conferred by humans on other humans; that is the foundation of the social contract.

· Raphaël Mahaim, Swiss National Councillor and lawyerMahaim uses the statement to argue that judicial decision-making should remain under human control.
About this summary

Originally published by Le Temps in French. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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