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Anonymisation of Judicial Rulings for Legal Analytics Purposes: Ethics, Law, and Compliance

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Progress in Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 14116))

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Abstract

Legal Analytics (LA) techniques are a useful tool in the process of digitisation of judicial systems. However, they may imply processing of personal data contained in judicial rulings. This requires an assessment of the impact generated on the rights and freedoms of individuals. What happens if personal data are processed, with LA and AI systems, for research purposes, such as prediction? Should be taken additional technical and organisational measures for the protection of individuals, such as anonymisation or pseudonymisation? The EU legal framework does not interfere with data processing of courts acting in their judicial capacity, in order to safeguard the independence of the judiciary. Therefore, the decision to anonymise judgments is normally taken by the Court’s rules or procedures. The paper provides an overview of the different policies adopted by the different EU countries, investigating whether they should apply to researchers performing LA of judicial rulings. The paper also illustrates how such issues have been dealt within the Legal Analytics for Italian LAw (LAILA) project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research within the “PRIN programme”.

Dr. Jacopo Ciani Sciolla wrote paragraphs 3.1, 3.2, 3.3. Dr. Ludovica Paseri wrote paragraphs 1, 2 and 4.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Italian Constitutional Court, Judgment no. 35548 of 28 October 2020.

  2. 2.

    Article 2-duodecies Legislative Decree, June 30 2003, no. 196.

  3. 3.

    ECHR, Rules of Courts, 20 March 2023, Strasbourg.

  4. 4.

    That is the case in the German, Austrian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portuguese, Slovak and Swedish legal orders.

  5. 5.

    That is the case in the Cypriot, Irish, Italian, Maltese and United Kingdom legal orders. The Practice Guidance—Anonymisation of Parties to Asylum & Immigration cases by the Court of Appeal Civil Division released in March 2022 gives priority to open justice and establishes that any departure from this principle will need to be justified in order to protect the interests of a party or secure the proper administration of justice. Accordingly, judgments will be anonymised where there is a statutory prohibition on naming, for example, a victim of a sexual offence or a victim of trafficking (sections 1 and 2 of the Sexual Offences Amendment Act 1992, as amended) or a child subject to family law proceedings (section 97(2) of the Children Act 1989).

  6. 6.

    That group comprises, first of all, the Belgian, Croatian, Spanish, French, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovenian and Czech legal orders.

  7. 7.

    This is the case of Austrian, Finnish, Hungarian and Portuguese law.

  8. 8.

    In Austria, this principle is fixed in § 15 OGH-G.

  9. 9.

    In Croatia, Rules on anonymisation distinguish between decisions from civil, commercial and administrative proceedings and decisions from criminal and misdemeanor proceedings. The latter are subject to a stronger level of anonymisation with data concerning Institution, State, city and local body, public company and associations and trade unions omitted.

  10. 10.

    This is clarified by the Italian Constitutional Court 15 February 2017, no. 11959, which excludes that the requirement could be understood as “legal grounds”.

  11. 11.

    The need for balancing the competing interests at stake has been confirmed by the Italian Constitutional Court, 7 August 2020, no. 16807.

  12. 12.

    The expression refers to “the personal data disclosure capacity to reverberate negative consequences on the various aspects of the social and relationship life of the data subject (for example, in the family or work sphere), thus having a heavy impact on the right to privacy of the individual (typically, for instance, facts of harassment in the family sphere).

  13. 13.

    Italian Constitutional Court, 9 February 2022, no. 4167.

  14. 14.

    The United Kingdom Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has taken a similar stance. See: [27]. The Dutch Data Protection Authority, by contrast, pointed out that it does not qualify as a legitimate interest, one that only serves purely commercial interests, see: [28].

  15. 15.

    Specifically, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos – AEPD) states that legitimate interest can serve as a lawful basis for those personal data processing operations that involve, as in some ML cases, access to training data, “provided that the circumstances that allow their use are verified”, see: [30]. The ICO, in its 2020 Guidance on Artificial Intelligence and Data Protection points out that it is possible to rely on legitimate interests.

  16. 16.

    In the previous wording, the provision specified also that the reproduction could be intended “for legal information purposes in legal journals, electronic media or via electronic communication networks”. Such specification has been deleted in 2018.

  17. 17.

    This is confirmed by the Guidelines on the processing of personal data in the reproduction of court orders issued by the Italian Data Protection Authority.

  18. 18.

    Recital 14 states that the “Regulation does not cover the processing of personal data which concerns legal persons and in particular undertakings established as legal persons, including the name and the form of the legal person and the contact details of the legal person”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Law Department, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Jacopo Ciani Sciolla & Ludovica Paseri

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  1. Jacopo Ciani Sciolla
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  2. Ludovica Paseri
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Correspondence to Jacopo Ciani Sciolla .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Nuno Moniz

  2. GECAD, Polytechnic of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Zita Vale

  3. GRIA—LIACC, University of Azores, Ponta Delgada, Portugal

    José Cascalho

  4. CISUC, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Catarina Silva

  5. IEETA, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Raquel Sebastião

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Sciolla, J.C., Paseri, L. (2023). Anonymisation of Judicial Rulings for Legal Analytics Purposes: Ethics, Law, and Compliance. In: Moniz, N., Vale, Z., Cascalho, J., Silva, C., Sebastião, R. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14116. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49011-8_9

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