Biometric surveillance in the Czech Republic: the Ministry of the Interior is trying to circumvent the Artificial Intelligence Act
EDRi-member Iuridicum Remedium draws attention to the way biometric surveillance at airports should be legalised in the Czech Republic. According to the proposal, virtually anyone could become a person under surveillance. Moreover, surveillance could be extended from airports to other public spaces.
In September, the Czech government adopted a proposal by the Ministry of the Interior to legalise automated facial recognition at international airports. The government approved the proposal with changes: the time limit on the retention of unrecognised data on all airport visitors will be reduced from 90 to 30 days.
However, the main problem regarding the judicial authorisation to include a person in the reference database remains. According to the EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, the use of a facial recognition system on a specific person must be authorised by a court or other independent authority. But according to the Czech Ministry of the Interior, the court could also authorise entire “predefined categories of persons”. With such a vague definition, virtually anyone can be included in the database.
This effectively denies the basic control mechanism that the complexly negotiated AI Act brought. The aim is clearly to keep the system at the airport running in essentially the same way as it has been operating since 2018, even if it is – according to our analysis – contrary to the law.
The current proposal only concerns the airport. However, the Ministry did not originally envisage such a restriction at all. It was only after comments from civil society that the law was limited to the use of airport systems. However, the explanatory memorandum shows that the ministry is certainly not opposed to extending the systems to other public spaces.
IuRe have therefore launched a special campaign against biometric surveillance. The website The Czech Republic is not China (only in Czech) introduces the public to the current issue in the form of a quiz. It has been shown in the past that changes can be achieved with the right social pressure, and hopefully it will be possible to do so again.
Contribution by: Hynek Trojánek, EDRi-member, Iuridicum Remedium