The use of algorithmic systems and data analytics by public institutions to support consequential decisions affecting people's lives raises many challenges to democratic governance and the legitimacy of government decision-making and policymaking. The lack of meaningful transparency and civic participation in how these systems are developed, implemented, and generally used are key factors underpinning such challenges.

Yet, state institutions in Latin America have increasingly deployed AI and automated decision-making (ADM) systems to perform their functions in law enforcement, social welfare, and other government fields with no appropriate legal safeguards, institutional structure, impact assessments, and meaningful social oversight. Our new report builds on inter-American Human Rights Standards to draw implications and an operational framework for their due consideration in government use of AI and ADM. We delved into Inter-American Human Rights System's crucial documents and court cases as a vital baseline guiding states' activities in the Americas. We compiled the main standards and passages we considered in the accompanying Appendix.

On this page, you can easily access the implications of inter-American standards to government use of AI and our recommendations & operational framework for the application of those standards. You can also find testimonies from our allies about how such findings are relevant to tackling current challenges they have faced in Latin American countries.

The full report is available in PDF.

We hope it can provide robust guidelines for States' analysis on whether and how the implementation of algorithmic systems is an adequate means to achieve policy goals. We also hope it strengthens civil society and affected groups' ability to vindicate their rights in the context of government use of AI and to join related decision and evaluation processes. After all, political participation is also a right that States must promote and respect under the Inter-American Human Rights System.