City Law School Symposium Report
By Sekander Zulker Nayeen, Laura Vialon, Cheryl Dine and Talha Boyraz
On Tuesday, 6th May, 2025, Professor Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos organised an influential symposium entitled ‘AI and Modern Technologies in Criminal Justice: Opportunities and Human Rights Implications’ held at the City Law School, City St George’s, University of London. It was focused on discussing the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies on the criminal justice system, while critically examining accompanying human rights considerations.

Ms Penelope Gibbs presenting
Panel 1 – Live Facial Recognition, technologically enhanced investigative methods and suspects’ digital rights
The first panel was chaired by the Head of Department at The City Law School, Professor Dimitrios Giannoulopoulos. He stated that the symposium would bring together three aspects: criminal justice, technology and human rights. He hoped that it would give an insight into the topics to everyone who joined both in-person and online. He then introduced and called all the panellists to start the discussion on their topics.
Madeleine Stone, a Senior Advocacy Officer of Big Brother Watch, presented on Live Facial Recognition and Human Rights. She informed that facial recognition is being used in both the private and public sectors. For example, the retailer, as a private entity, uses it. At the same time, police, as a public sector entity, use it. It could be of two types: facial recognition for identification and facial recognition for verification.
Police usually use facial recognition for identification and verification in three ways: live facial recognition, retrospective facial recognition, operator operator-initiated facial recognition. In case of live facial recognition, police scan faces in real time in public spaces, such as streets, events, and then they match the faces against a watchlist. It can also immediately create alerts when someone on the list is detected. Retrospective facial recognition, common in the US but also used in the UK, involves matching images from CCTV or social media to extensive police databases. Operator-initiated recognition allows officers to take photos in the field and instantly compare them against existing image databases.