Fair trial and language assistance in a machine-translated world

Development summary

Dawid Stadniczeńko’s article in AI Law Politics asks whether AI-mediated interpreting and machine translation can satisfy the fair-trial right to adequate language assistance for people who do not understand the language of the proceedings. On the basis of Article 6 ECHR, Directive 2010/64/EU and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, it recasts language assistance as an adequacy standard tied to a person’s actual communicative capacity and argues that generic systems trained on adult speech and high-resource standard languages cannot meet that threshold, especially for vulnerable users such as children; it therefore proposes human oversight and limits on unedited machine output in proceedings affecting vulnerable parties.