Important decision
The Constitutional Court imposed a fine of CZK 25 000 on a Prague attorney for arguing in his constitutional complaint against non-existent decisions of the Constitutional Court and the ECHR that were “generated” by artificial intelligence. According to the court, he thus made the procedure of the proceedings grossly difficult – and he explicitly emphasized that the lawyer is responsible for the content of the submission, regardless of the tools he chooses to write it.
The lawyer filed a constitutional complaint on behalf of his client (the applicant for temporary residence), which at first glance appeared formally impeccable. However, upon close inspection, the Constitutional Court found that some of the twelve cited decisions of the Constitutional Court and the ECtHR did not exist at all, others were grossly misinterpreted, and only a few of them had any real relevance to the case. The Court therefore concluded that these were not individual typos, but fundamental errors, and imposed a fine on the lawyer for grossly obstructing the proceedings pursuant to Section 61(1) of the Constitutional Court Act.
The Constitutional Court also recalled that the purpose of the mandatory representation by a lawyer is to ensure that communication with the Constitutional Court is conducted at an appropriate substantive and formal level and that the complainants do not rely on ignorance of the law or procedural rules. Orderly fines are imposed by the court only very rarely – in the past, for example, they have been imposed on a bailiff or a group of MPs – but the sanction for uncritical use of generative AI is a new one. The attorney in question, Pavol Kehl, has already admitted error, remedied the defects in the complaint, and publicly expressed regret that he used the AI under time pressure; but that does not change the fact, according to the court, that the “hallucinatory” reasoning of the machine model is no excuse and the responsibility always lies with the human.
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