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EU Parliament calls for ban of public facial recognition, but leaves human rights gaps in final position on AI Act [1]

['Ella Jakubowska', 'Senior Policy Advisor', 'Sarah Chander']

Date: 2023-06

Today, June 14, the European Parliament plenary voted in favour of strong fundamental rights protections in their official position on the Artificial Intelligence Act, including maintaining positive steps on fundamental rights impact assessments and transparency requirements.

The vote also upheld red lines against unacceptably harmful uses of AI, including decisively protecting people against live facial recognition and other biometric surveillance in public spaces, emotion recognition in key sectors, biometric categorisation, predictive policing and social scoring.

This is a critical time for AI regulation globally, and the EU Parliament’s final position is in many ways a win for fundamental rights.

Work on the EU AI Act started in 2020, and EDRi’s network and partners have been urging EU lawmakers to prioritise fundamental rights and put people before profits from the beginning.

MEPs choose freedom and democracy over biometric surveillance dystopia

In a historic step, EU Parliamentarians have listened to evidence in ensuring that all live, and most retrospective, uses of remote biometric identification (RBI) systems, in public spaces, are prohibited in their text.

This puts the preservation of free expression, assembly, and non-discrimination in public spaces in a strong position going into trilogues (negotiations) with the Council of the European Union Member States.

The Parliament also voted to ban biometric categorisation on the basis of sensitive characteristics such as perceived sexuality, gender, race or ethnicity, and emotion recognition in education settings, workplaces, by police, and at borders – the prohibitions of which are just as important for preventing discrimination and protecting human rights as bans on RBI.

This was the culmination of years of work by a diverse group of 80 civil society groups in the Reclaim Your Face campaign. We will continue to fight for full protection from all retrospective RBI, all emotion recognition and automated behavioural detection in public spaces.

Despite an aggressive last minute push from the centre-right EPP party to overturn the committee agreement on biometric surveillance, the MEPs showed that they heard the voices of over 250,000 people across Europe who want keep our public spaces free of facial recognition and other biometric mass surveillance systems.

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[1] Url: https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-plenary-ban-of-public-facial-recognition-human-rights-gaps-ai-act/

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