In a huge victory for human rights, the European Parliament has just voted to adopt a new report which calls to ban biometric mass surveillance. This is a key moment for the Reclaim Your Face campaign, because, although the report is not legally binding, it gives a strong indication of the Parliament’s position on the ‘Artificial Intelligence Act’.

Over 61,000 EU citizens have already signed our official initiative to ban biometric mass surveillance practices in EU law. Now, we have clear evidence that our voices have been heard! In what’s known as an own-initiative report (INI), the European Parliament decided to proactively set out their vision that police should use artificial intelligence technologies only in ways that respect people’s human rights and freedoms. This includes a demand to ban biometric mass surveillance, which is one of the most powerful and progressive calls we have seen from politicians or lawmakers anywhere in the world. Specifically, the report:

• Warns about the severe risks of police uses of facial authentification / verification, and the need for such applications to be necessary and proportionate (§ 25);
• Calls for a moratorium (time-limited suspension) of any facial identification by police until it can be proven as fundamental rights-compliant. If this cannot be proven, it must be banned (§27) (see the final bullet point for an even stronger outcome on any facial ID that leads to mass surveillance);
• For other biometric features, demands ‘a permanent prohibition of the use of automated analysis and/or recognition in publicly accessible spaces of other human features, such as gait, fingerprints, DNA, voice, and other biometric and behavioural signals’ (§26);
• Recommends a ban on the use of private databases, like Clearview AI, by law enforcement (§28);
• And the pièce de résistance: ‘calls on the Commission, therefore, to implement, through legislative and non-legislative means, and if necessary through infringement proceedings, a ban on any processing of biometric data, including facial images, for law enforcement purposes that leads to mass surveillance in publicly accessible spaces’ as well as a ban on funding mass surveillance research (§31).

These are not the only exciting bits of the report. The report also takes a view of AI harms as structural, pointing to the severe risks for racialised and minoritised people. It even calls to prohibit discriminatory predictive policing practices, which rob people of the presumption of innocence.

This report matters so much because it gives the Parliament’s lead negotiators a clear message from their colleagues to push for a ban on biometric mass surveillance in their position on the AI Act, which they will have to negotiate with representatives from every EU member state’s government.

Whilst we celebrated the AI Act for its in-principle ban on real-time remote biometric identification by law enforcement, we called out the enormous holes in this so-called ‘ban’ and the fact that it would not prevent biometric mass surveillance. Now, we have a chance to ensure that the Act really does fulfill its promise to protect individuals, communities, and democracies from the threat of constant biometric surveillance.

Many organisations within the Reclaim Your Face campaign joined the push to help overturn an attempt from some members of the European Parliament (in particular from the right-wing EPP group) to weaken the report and explicitly allow biometric mass surveillance. Today, we celebrate and thank the brave MEPs that stood up for rights and freedoms. Tomorrow, we continue the fight to ban biometric mass surveillance and reclaim our faces!

Read the full text (EN) of the adopted report and check for other language versions.