The Clinic: Digilaw

This project seeks to address the accessibility challenges surrounding harmonized public safety standards in the European Union. These standards, mandated by the European Commission and integrated into national laws, were recently deemed "EU Law" by the EU Court of Justice (Case C-588/21). Despite their critical public safety implications, these standards are often subject to restrictive copyright claims, exorbitant fees, and general inaccessibility.

The initiative will involve Sciences Po students working in a project aiming to advocate for greater transparency and access to these standards. Students will submit formal requests to acquire several specific standards from French authorities such as AFNOR or the French government, leveraging French public records law and the EU court decision. If these requests are denied, students will proceed with administrative appeals to further their case. Parallel efforts will be conducted in the Netherlands to examine the transposition of the EU court ruling into national frameworks.

By the project's end, a comprehensive report will be drafted by teams from France and the Netherlands, detailing their findings and providing comparative insights into how different countries approach the accessibility of public safety standards. The report will be released in March, followed by briefings to stakeholders, including government officials, industry representatives, and the press.

The project offers a unique educational experience, blending administrative law practice with broader strategic advocacy, and provides students with the opportunity to compare European systems with similar initiatives in jurisdictions like the US and India. Students will gain hands-on experience in administrative procedures, legal research, and cross-jurisdictional collaboration, fostering both practical skills and a deeper understanding of public interest law.

• Partner: Public.Resource.Org, Inc.
• Tutor: Lyubomir Nikiforov 

The clinical project inquires into certain aspects of algorithmic predictive justice with a focus on the role of algorithmic surveillance in criminal cases concerning terrorist suspects in France. Through the research we conducted during the 2023-2024 academic year, we were able to confirm our working hypothesis according to which intelligence gathered at the early stage of (algorithmic) watch-listing has been increasingly used as evidence in criminal trials to prosecute and sentence potentially dangerous individuals before any violent act has been committed. 

By partnering with lawyers of the current Conférence du Stage cohort, the Observatoire International des Prisons, Rémi Carayol (journalist at Médiapart and le Monde Dipomatique), and a myriad of different actors in the French criminal legal system, the first part of the project chronicled how some court decisions and prison sentences are heavily based on public and private information derived from intelligence. 

It also developed a detailed account of the legal infrastructure making this possible and identifies the legal actions available to contest these processes. For the second year of the project, the emphasis is on expanding on the most relevant aspects -already identified- of algorithmic surveillance in France, paying attention to the intersections between private and public actors shaping the narratives, aesthetics and rationales behind this phenomenon. As such, it investigates how algorithmic surveillance is deployed to legitimize pre-determined conclusions (sometimes even prison sentences) around individuals deemed as dangerous. 

• Partner: Sciences Po Law School, assistant professor Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi
• Tutor: Anamaria Munoz