Of the diverse array of contemporary challenges around humanitarian access in armed conflict, a particular set of issues concerns the so-called “criminalization” of humanitarian action under counterterrorism frameworks. This presentation raises some key elements of that set of issues.

In the European Union (EU) and Europe in general, there is currently no legally binding definition of artificial intelligence (AI) nor a common EU framework for the regulation of AI. The EU Independent High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) defines AI systems as “software (and possibly also hardware) systems designed by humans that, given a complex goal, act in the physical or digital dimension by perceiving their environment through data acquisition, interpreting the collected structured or unstructured data, reasoning on the knowledge, or processing the information, derived from this data and deciding the best action(s) to take to achieve the given goal.” The European Commission in its white paper emphasized that a definition of AI “will need to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate technical progress while being precise enough to provide the necessary legal certainty.” In particular, the terms “data” and “algorithm” need to be defined. With the exception of autonomous vehicles, there are not many AI-specific binding rules yet. A common EU legal framework, which has been proposed in the European Commission's white paper, will build trust and provide legal certainty for consumers and businesses.