As AI systems increasingly make decisions that affect people’s lives, they must respect human dignity. FDJ examines the human rights impact of automated systems and advocates for governance that keeps people, not machines, at the centre of accountability.
The question is not whether the system is clever
It is whether the person affected by it can find out what it decided, on what basis, and how to challenge it. Automated systems are arriving in Nigerian life through identity verification, credit scoring, fraud detection, content moderation and policing tools, and most of them are opaque to the people they classify.
Automated evidence deserves the same scrutiny as any other
Technical findings are increasingly offered as conclusive in public disputes. When the Independent National Electoral Commission announced that an account was “forensically unverifiable” and then declined to release the report, the method, the expert’s credentials and the engagement terms all stayed hidden. We asked a court to compel disclosure, because a forensic conclusion is only as reliable as the process that produced it. The same applies to any algorithmic output presented as proof.
Identity systems are the sharpest case
Nigeria’s national identity infrastructure now sits behind access to banking, telecommunications, pensions and travel. Automated matching errors in a system of that reach are not inconveniences; they are exclusions from ordinary life. Our work on the NIMC Act 2026 comes from that concern.
What we press for
- Notice to people when a consequential decision about them is made or assisted by an automated system.
- A meaningful route to human review, not an automated appeal against an automated decision.
- Disclosure of method, provenance and testing when technical findings are relied on in legal or public proceedings.
- Assessment of discriminatory impact before deployment in policing, welfare and identity systems.
- Governance that treats accountability as belonging to institutions and people, never to a model.
These are not futuristic concerns. They are the ordinary consequences of decisions being taken faster than they can be explained.
If an automated decision has affected your rights, report a case to us.