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Digital Age

Rapid advances in digital technology bring both opportunities and challenges for the Rule of Law. On the one hand, digitalisation offers potentially innovative solutions to age-old Rule of Law challenges: rendering governments more accountable by enhancing access to information, promoting transparency by enabling citizen collection and dissemination of evidence of human rights violations, bridging the justice gap by facilitating access to effective remedies and advancing financial inclusion by the equitable spread of Fintech. On the other hand, the use of predictive decision-making algorithms in law enforcement, the inadequacy of privacy safeguards in the age of surveillance capitalism, the reliability of facial recognition tools and the inability of electoral law to protect the integrity of the democratic process against manipulation, all point to the urgent need to ensure that the Rule of Law is not sacrificed in the rush to embrace technological opportunities. Our programme on the Rule of Law in the Digital Age, in close collaboration with data scientists, aims to embrace Rule of Law enhancing digital technologies, at the same time as informing debates about how to ensure that Rule of Law values are preserved, including where necessary by new or updated regulatory frameworks.

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