PM Bettel Delivers Opening Address at World Law Congress Session

On Monday 29 March 2021, Luxembourg's Prime Minister and Minister of Communications and Media, Xavier Bettel, delivered the opening remarks at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) session at the World Law Congress; this session was chaired by Viviane Reding, Vice President of the World Jurist Association, developed the topic of the evolution of the legal profession through AI technology.

In his speech, Prime Minister Bettel spoke of the potential of this new technology while stressing the importance of absolute respect for human rights during its development and during its use. This is to ensure, when programming an algorithm, to rule out all potential biases and to ensure that the algorithms guarantee equal treatment to every citizen. This is why AI courses are offered to Luxembourg civil servants, and a new course on AI ethics is being developed for the Luxembourg civil service.

"For me, it is fundamental that the human being will remain involved in data processing based on AI. The citizen must always be able to speak to people and not to algorithms. Furthermore, it is important to me that citizens will have confidence in AI, which is why I launched a public consultation on this subject, the results of which will be presented shortly," added PM Bettel.

Finally, the Prime Minister referred to the many opportunities of AI for lawyers, especially with regard to the analysis of large amounts of data from legislative texts or case law. Thus, the Central Legislation Service (SCL), responsible for the Official Journal, created the “Casemates” project based on Semantic Web technologies in order to improve access to legislation and optimize research, a project which is which has become a European benchmark and which two European countries have just adopted to modernize their systems for publishing legislation. The SCL is also currently examining the possibility of providing Legilux with a search functionality via an AI-based chatbot.