Artificial intelligence in EU asylum procedures: legal challenges and perspectives within the EU legal framework

This dissertation examines the procedural implications of deploying artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies in asylum procedures within the European Union (EU), from the perspective of EU law and its constitutional framework. It investigates how these technologies transform evidentiary standards, procedural safeguards, and applicants’ rights, and how EU law addresses these developments. The study argues that the integration of AI into asylum processes exposes structural tensions between the Union’s commitment to fundamental rights and its concurrent pursuit of technological innovation and administrative efficiency. The research shows that AI tools are increasingly deployed across procedural phases—including registration, credibility assessment, and case management—often without clear legal bases or explicit procedural safeguards. By generating automated evidence, these tools actively reshape the procedural architecture characteristic of EU asylum law, with significant implications for transparency, equality of arms, and the right to an effective remedy. Although the Common European Asylum System and the EU Artificial Intelligence Act constitute key regulatory pillars, their coexistence highlights a fragmented normative landscape. Drawing on doctrinal analysis of EU and national law, empirical mapping of AI tools in Member States, and case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights, the dissertation advances procedural fairness as the central constitutional principle for reconciling technological innovation with fundamental rights protection. It concludes that the digitalisation of asylum procedures represents not merely administrative modernisation but a constitutional transformation, testing the EU legal order’s capacity to align technological governance with the rule of law, legality, and fundamental rights as enshrined in EU law.