No to the anonymisation of sentences without human control

Among the most pervasive applications of artificial intelligence in judicial systems, the anonymisation of decisions represents, at least on the surface, a virtuous intervention: aimed at protecting the confidentiality of the parties involved, without compromising the principle of publicity of judicial decisions. However, the Italian case recently dealt with by the Lazio Regional Administrative Court (judgement no. 7625 of 17 April 2025) shows how, in the absence of a careful and conscious balancing of rights, the algorithm can turn from an instrument of transparency into a mechanism of opacity.

The affair is, in fact, emblematic. With the replacement of the National Jurisprudential Archive (Agn) with a new public database (Bdp), the Ministry of Justice intended to make the patrimony of Italian judgments more accessible. But when the new portal opened, legal practitioners - lawyers and scholars - found themselves faced with documents emptied of their informative content: removed were not only the names of the parties, but also dates, normative and jurisprudential references, even essential factual coordinates.

Aradical automation of the anonymisation process, devoid of human control and disengaged from context, has produced the paradoxical effect of annihilating the cognitive, orientative and guarantor function of jurisprudence. In the name of privacy it has ended up denying the right to knowledge of living law, calling into question the very intelligibility of the legal system.

The Regional Administrative Court, in a decision destined to set the standard, has made it clear that anonymisation cannot be reduced to a mere technical operation, nor flattened on a blind automatism. On the contrary, it affects the quality of justice and the effectiveness of the right of defence. It betrays the founding principle of law - da mihi factum, dabo tibi ius - any practice that obliterates facts, making it impossible to apply the rule consistently to the concrete case.

The ruling also highlights how generalised and indiscriminate anonymisation conflicts with constitutional and supranational principles. Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union - as well as Article 111 of the Italian Constitution - enshrine not only the publicity of hearings, but also the knowability of decisions. Publicity that does not end with the formal visibility of the text, but requires that the judgment be comprehensible, in its logic, in its motivational path, which cannot disregard the concrete case, and in its systemic implications.