Lawmaking and oversight

Context

AI systems are being deployed at scale across societies. AI solutions and products from the private sector are reshaping labour markets and influencing consumer behaviour at scale, while governments are deploying AI in areas that directly influence people’s lives. AI now shapes high-stakes decisions in welfare, education, policing and critical infrastructure – areas where errors or bias can scale rapidly and invisibly without clear lines of accountability or redress. The lawmaking and oversight functions of parliaments are therefore essential to governing the use of AI and harnessing AI for growth while safeguarding rights and democratic values. 

Parliaments have a unique mandate to translate ethical and human-rights principles into binding obligations, to set guardrails for high-risk uses, and to scrutinize both executive action and market conduct. A mix of risk-based, rights-based, sectoral and liability approaches allows legislators to sequence legislative and regulatory reforms pragmatically.

Parliamentary oversight is indispensable to protect rights, maintain public trust, and ensure that deployment choices align with democratic values rather than narrow technical or commercial considerations. Effective parliamentary oversight is also essential to uphold protections in legal frameworks, such as obligations for impact assessments, auditability, transparency and the empowerment of supervisory authorities. 

Many parliaments are engaging sectoral committees to address the cross-cutting impacts of AI on healthcare, education, environment, justice, labour and commerce. Oversight also requires parliaments to remain alert to AI capabilities and to the geopolitical and economic dimensions shaping the technology’s development globally.

Description

This session will balance cutting-edge information about the development, deployment and impact of AI with actionable frameworks for parliaments to address AI through their lawmaking and oversight roles. 

The session will address three core questions:

• Why is strong oversight of AI urgently needed to protect rights, uphold accountability and maintain public trust as systems scale into public services and markets? 

• What is the role of parliaments in setting guardrails and turning ethical and human-rights principles into binding rules while scrutinizing government and industry? 

• How can parliaments exercise oversight in practice, through measures such as impact assessments, transparency and audit duties, public registers, empowered supervisory authorities, targeted committee inquiries and systematic recommendation tracking?

The session will begin with a concise scene-setting briefing that frames current AI deployment patterns, risk profiles and oversight gaps. This will be followed by a focused expert panel offering evidence-based inputs from policy, technical, rights and public-sector perspectives on feasible guardrails. The session will also showcase oversight tools and legislative choices from different regions, before closing with an interactive group-work segment where participants will select priority measures they can take in their lawmaking and oversight roles.

Organization

• Opening statement: “Why legislative oversight matters more than ever in the AI era”

• Panel discussion: “The urgency of parliamentary action on AI through lawmaking and oversight”, including showcase of parliamentary actions on AI

• Group work: Lawmaking and oversight priorities

• Discussion of results, reflections and conclusions