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Within modern multicultural societies, cultural expertise is often called upon to resolve conflicts such as family disputes, asylum cases, and banking, litigation and criminal law issues. The EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum, for example, requires courts to include first-hand knowledge of an applicant’s country of origin in their assessment of cases.
Currently, cultural expertise is provided by expert witnesses, specialists who draw from a deep understanding of case-law and the cultural background of those involved. “The role of cultural expertise is not to provide cultural defence, but to inform the court of the social and legal background, to assist all parties in the case,” explains project coordinator Livia Holden, director of Research at CNRS and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. “If we strive for inclusive justice, it is in our interest to hear the voice of everyone in society.”
Access to expertise
However, securing cultural expertise is often a difficult and expensive process, which can significantly disadvantage lower-income individuals, adding stress and expense to judicial proceedings. The CULTEXP project, funded by the European Research Council, aims to increase access to cultural expertise via a digital collection and AI tools. “What we offer is access to the database of legal precedents, and the automated production of expert reports, as well as the review of these expert reports by human scholars, and training for experts,” says Holden.
Holden previously headed the EURO-EXPERT project, which carried out interviews with legal professionals across 16 countries, and gathered approximately 4 000 examples of case-law and 1 000 expert reports from EU and national jurisdictions, and also established collaborations with jurisdictions in Asia. CULTEXP was launched to develop this database into commercially viable tools.
CULTEXP is the first multilingual and cross-jurisdictional database on cultural expertise. Users can search for case reports in any language, and the results can be translated on-site. CULTEXP shows country-specific legal citations, and wherever possible, the European Case-Law Identifier. It is free for users, accessible without training, and inexpensive to run.
Expert reports can be produced automatically from the database in a matter of minutes, compiling relevant judgments and supporting information taken from multiple jurisdictions and languages. Previously, this process could take a legal researcher three to six months.
Automated anonymity
To help build the database, Holden and her colleagues developed Elydor, the world’s first multilingual redaction tool. The AI-powered archival system anonymises case reports so that they can be added to the CULTEXP database in a GDPR-compliant manner. The system scans documents’ names, dates and other identifiable information, and automatically replaces them. “Elydor can anonymise a report in three minutes, a task which would take a human archivist a whole day,” adds Holden.
By reducing the time it takes to provide expert reports, the project offers not only better access to justice for those in the legal system, but a significant economic benefit by reducing the length of the legal proceedings.
In 2022, Holden was granted an honorary membership to the Canadian Anthropology Association (CASCA) as acknowledgement of her work on the subject of cultural expertise, and the potential for EURO-EXPERT and CULTEXP networks to support Canadian anthropologists providing services to the courts.
Holden and her team are now applying for a Transition grant from the European Innovation Council to validate the market potential for the database and its services.