Finland: Regulation and doctrinal challenges of automated decision-making in Public Administration
Koivisto, I., Heikkonen, S. K., & Koulu, R. (2024). Finland: Regulation and Doctrinal Challenges of Automated Decision-Making in Public Administration. In Public Digitalisation in a Legal Perspective: Status, Challenges and Opportunities for Nordic-Baltic Cooperation (pp. 71-117). Nordic Council of Ministers.
In this chapter, we discuss the digital public administration in Finland from the perspective of automated decision-making. The digitalisation of public administration has been kicked into high gear within the last couple of decades and digital technologies have been adopted to assist and replace previous analogic public administrative work. New national legislation enabling the use of automated decision-making has been passed and multiple EU law instruments apply in the field and continue to do so. In this chapter we present, analyse and elaborate the legal landscape of digital public administration in Finland. The overview of the legal landscape shows the importance of understanding the adopted technology not only in relation to the applicable rules, but also in the deeper logics of administrative law as well as the situation-specific requirements within the administrative processes. Our focus is on a new national legislation which allows the use of automated decision-making in Finnish public administration. However, this is not the only framework which is applicable to digital administration. Instead, at the same time, the technologies used in public administration are contextually dependent on the logics of the administrative legal system and the specific material task that the technology is equipped to perform. That being the case, closer Nordic collaboration could be investigated further because of the cultural, linguistic, and legal similarities.