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AI Accountability in Justice and Medicine | Ethics & EU AI Act

Subtitle Τίτλου<br>How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Justice, Medicine, and Human Accountability

by Pelagia Eleutheriadou<br>29 June 2026

29 June 2026<br>0 comments

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Table of Contents

Editorial Note: This article serves as an introductory overview of a subject that is at once legally urgent, ethically contested, and institutionally underexamined. Given its breadth, each section necessarily operates as a thematic threshold rather than an exhaustive treatment. Future columns in this series will develop each dimension in depth: the algorithmic fairness problem and its implications for judicial practice; the specific governance gaps in the AI Act’s enforcement architecture; the bioethical reconfiguration required by opaque medical AI systems; and the question of liability in distributed human-algorithmic decision chains. The present text maps the terrain. What follows, in the columns ahead, will excavate it.

Introduction: An Invisible Judge

The integration of artificial intelligence into decision-making did not happen abruptly, nor did it arrive through a single institutional rupture. It evolved gradually — first in research, then in clinical and judicial practice.

I have been working for thirteen years in courts of first instance, primarily in civil proceedings. I know what makes a case file heavy: psychiatric assessments, forensic reports, social evaluations. I also know where technology ends and judgment begins, or at least that was true until recently. Artificial intelligence (hereafter AI) does not come to abolish that distinction. It blurs it. The critical question is no longer whether AI will enter the justice system — it already has — but who bears responsibility when its use leads to error. The defendant, the victim, the patient: none of them asks which model processed their data. Yet each of them expects someone to be accountable.

What Exactly Is Changing

Machine learning algorithms are not an invention of the last five years. What is changing now is where they are applied: in domains where human judgment was never merely an option — it was the process itself.

In oncology, the Sybil model developed at MIT Jameel Clinic detects lung cancer risk up to six years before symptoms appear, achieving an AUC of 0.92–0.94 for one-year prediction, based solely on low-dose CT scans.1 We are speaking of medicine that diagnoses people who feel perfectly healthy and this is no longer considered remarkable; it is simply the direction the field has taken. Kuhn was right: a gap is not being filled, a new map is being drawn.2

In forensic medicine, digital tools are now entering the drafting of expert reports. They identify injury patterns, estimate time of death, and filter toxicological data. Research platforms such as InForensic at the University of Piraeus have already broken new ground. No official announcement was made that something had changed. It simply changed.

What the Law Says — and What It Leaves Unsaid

The AI Act

Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the AI Act, entered into force on 1 August 2024 and applies progressively.3 Its phased implementation reflects both the original risk-based architecture of the Regulation and the subsequent legislative adjustments intended to facilitate effective compliance. The first prohibitions applied from February 2025; obligations for general-purpose AI systems (GPAI) have been in force since August 2025. Following the provisional political agreement reached by the Council and the European Parliament on 7 May 2026 under the AI Omnibus package, the application of obligations for stand-alone high-risk AI systems listed in Annex III — including judicial and medical applications — is expected to be deferred until 2 December 2027, while obligations for high-risk AI systems embedded in regulated products under Annex I are expected to apply from 2 August 2028, subject to the adoption of the Digital Omnibus package.3,18

The Regulation is structured around risk tiers. What is deemed unacceptable, such as social scoring of citizens, is expressly prohibited. Systems falling within the high-risk category, including medical and judicial applications, are subject to strict requirements regarding transparency, documentation, and human oversight. Annex III, paragraphs 6–8, explicitly designates systems that process medical data or are used in judicial proceedings as high-risk.3 If a machine participates in decisions that affect lives, someone must be capable of sitting in the dock.

The GDPR: A Right That Was Already There

Regulation (EU) 2016/679 — the GDPR —...