Conference Agenda

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has sparked significant transformations across various sectors, necessitating urgent legislative responses to mitigate their societal impact and safeguard human rights. Leading here is the European Union (EU), with its landmark regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU AI Act, and the Framework Convention on Artificial Intelligence (Council of Europe), which serve as critical measures. These frameworks prioritize high-risk AI applications while fostering transparency, accountability, and ethical standards. This paper explores AI and legislation research trends, focusing on human rights protection, through bibliometric analysis of 2,590 academic documents indexed in the Scopus database up to October 2024. Results reveal exponential growth in scholarly interest since 2020, yet gaps persist in addressing marginalized communities and global equity. Key themes include privacy and data protection, algorithmic bias and non-discrimination, and accountability and transparency. This study informs academic and policymaking communities by identifying research gaps and emphasizing the need for robust, rights-focused frameworks in AI regulation.

AI has entered into all facets of the government decision-making process. Governments too recognize the transformative potential of the AI in enhancing efficient DM through informed and evidence-based policies. Policy maker’s traditional method of manual analysis is replaced with more accurate prediction and informed choice. Not only AI has contributed in routine automated labor-intensive tasks, but concentrated on complex societal challenges. It helped the civil servants to focus on much higher strategic planning and analysis. This paper will explore the potential benefits, considerations in adopting AI tools & ethical concerns of the AI’s intervention into the public policy decision-making process and how Artificial Intelligence is transforming public sector and government processes, improving citizen services and efficiency to optimize administrative procedures, enhance decision-making through data-driven perspectives, and develop flexible, citizen-focused services how Artificial Intelligence promotes innovation in the provision of public services by enabling smarter governance.

Gender-responsive public procurement (GRPP) represents an innovative tool adopted by the European Commission as part of the European Strategy for Gender Equality 2020-2025, aimed at promoting gender mainstreaming through public contracts, thereby empowering women and fostering sustainable and inclusive growth across Europe.

In the Italian legal system, GRPP was introduced through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan and, more specifically, with the enactment of the new Public Contracts Code (Legislative Decree No. 36 of 2023).

In particular, Articles 57 and 61 of the Code introduced social clauses that contracting authorities must incorporate in order to ensure equal opportunities, establishing mandatory requirements or granting additional points in the procurement evaluation process.

Moreover, Article 46-bis of the Equal Opportunities Code (Legislative Decree No. 198 of 2006) established the Gender Equality Certification System, which plays a crucial role in the context of public procurement, by encouraging participating companies to adopt gender-sensitive practices through a reward-based mechanism.

This certification is recognized as one of the conditions for reducing the amount of the provisional guarantee that economic operators must provide, according to Article 106 of the Code, to participate in the procurement process. Additionally, under Article 108, paragraph 7, contracting authorities can award additional points to companies holding the certification, granting them a competitive advantage over the other ones in the public procedures they participate in.

The widespread adoption of these measures can be facilitated through the effective implementation of digital tools, distributed ledger technologies and artificial intelligence techniques (AI). For this reason, the paper seeks to analyze how digitalization and automatization of the public procurement life cycle, as promoted by Articles 11-36 of the Legislative Decree No.36 of 2023, may contribute to advancing the objectives of GRPP.

First of all, the application of digital tools to public procurement can help direct public funds towards policy priorities, such as gender equality. In this context, the effective implementation of the «virtual file of economic operators» (Art. 24) holds strategic significance, enabling contracting authorities to verify, more transparently, the existence of certifications, including that related to gender equality.

Furthermore, GRPP can be further enhanced through the automatization of public contracts procedures, utilizing advanced technologies such as blockchain or artificial intelligence (Art. 30).

Article 106 is the only regulation that explicitly refers to blockchain and it relates to the management of provisional guarantees. Since gender certification allows for a reduction in the amount, distributed ledgers technologies can support, albeit indirectly, the achievement of GRPP objectives.

In conclusion, it is important to recognize the potential of AI, even though machine learning-based algorithms are not yet employed in the Italian public contracts. Indeed, AI could serve as a valuable tool for officials in administrations who draft notices with social clauses aimed at promoting gender equality. It could also assist them in automating the verification of certifications and the evaluation of criteria for awarding bonus points, both related to gender equality certification.

While Artificial Intelligence’s impact can bring considerable benefits, especially for the private sector, there are undeniable risks for the public sector.

The main concerns are related to security, prejudice and discrimination, and privacy issues.

Artificial intelligence can drop a veil over decades of achievements in terms of democracy and participatory processes, drawing citizens and their underlying interests away from the public decision-making circuit to which they had been painstakingly drawn.

The challenge to democracy posed by artificial intelligence passes through information as a data medium for democratic participation. It has already been accused of creating uncontrollable news on the web, where content is presented based on what the user has interacted with in the past, instead of creating an open environment for multi-voice, inclusive and accessible debate. It can also be used to create fake but extremely realistic images, videos and audio, known as deepfakes, which can be used to defraud, ruin reputations and undermine trust in decision-making processes. All these risks leading to the biasing of public debate and the manipulation of elections.

Adoption of AI in democratic participation naturally raises important ethical and transparency challenges. Algorithm opacity and a lack of understanding of how AI makes decisions could undermine public trust. It is crucial to ensure that AI-based decision-making processes are transparent, inclusive and include accountability mechanisms. Furthermore, it is necessary to prevent discrimination and misuse of data in the creation of AI algorithms and models.

AI technology may pose large-scale risks to democracy, including acute harm to individuals, large-scale harm to society. Problematically, there may not be a single responsible party or institution that primarily qualifies as the culprit even when there is a single responsible institution, there are different types of misunderstandings and intentions that could lead to harmful outcomes. These types of risks include larger-than-expected, worse-than-expected AI impacts, deliberately accepted side effects of other objectives.

Possible ways forward go in different directions and must concern a connection between the principle of participation and the new technological challenges through the realization that the institutions as conceived decades ago are obsolete, but the principle of law guiding them is not.