Artificial intelligence has been used to predict the outcome of judicial decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with 79% accuracy.

Researchers at University College London and the universities of Sheffield and Pennsylvania fed the AI English language data sets pertaining to 584 cases and let the algorithm find patterns in the text.

All of the cases related to specific articles of the Convention on Human Rights (Articles 3, 6 and 8). To prevent bias and mislearning, they selected an equal number of violation and non-violation cases.

“We don’t see AI replacing judges or lawyers, but we think they’d find it useful for rapidly identifying patterns in cases that lead to certain outcomes. It could also be a valuable tool for highlighting which cases are most likely to be violations of the European Convention on Human Rights,” explained Dr Nikolaos Aletras, who led the study at UCL Computer Science.

In developing the AI, the researchers found that judgements by the ECtHR are often based on non-legal facts rather than directly legal arguments, which makes the job of an AI even harder.

To get to a judgement, the AI deliberated over language used as well as the topics and circumstances mentioned in the case text. The AI also looked at the factual background to the case.

By combining the information extracted from the case files, the AI achieved an accuracy of 79%.

“Previous studies have predicted outcomes based on the nature of the crime, or the policy position of each judge, so this is the first time judgements have been predicted using analysis of text prepared by the court. We expect this sort of tool would improve efficiencies of high level, in demand courts, but to become a reality, we need to test it against more articles and the case data submitted to the court,” added Dr Lampos.

The articles chosen by the researchers were used because they represented cases about fundamental rights and because there was a large amount of published data on them.

However, the researchers would have like to have been given access to application made directly to court, rather than having to make do with the outcome of those applications.

“Ideally, we’d test and refine our algorithm using the applications made to the court rather than the published judgements, but without access to that data we rely on the court-published summaries of these submissions,” explained co-author, Dr Vasileios Lampos, UCL Computer Science.