Regulating the Future: A Comparative Analysis of Pakistan’s Need for EU-Based Cyber Privacy Frameworks
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Digital rights##common.commaListSeparator## Cyber-policing##common.commaListSeparator## AI-enabled law enforcement##common.commaListSeparator## Algorithmic bias##common.commaListSeparator## Pakistan data protection##article.abstract##
The use of cyber technologies in Pakistan has been both exposed in the governance system, commercial practices, law enforcement, and daily living, providing a great benefit by causing a real efficiency improvement, and at the same time, also presents severe threats to privacy and data security, among other essential rights. Without a regulatory framework of AI that is elaborate, enforceable, and solid in use rights-based protections, the remaining ones are still in bits, mostly aspirational, and poor. In comparison, the coherent risk-oriented regulatory model implemented in the European Union via the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) is based on the principles of human dignity, accountability, and democratic control.
The article aims at achieving three research objectives: first, due to its doctrinal nature, to examine the current and proposed laws on data protection and AI-based decision-making in Pakistan; second, to comparatively explore how the EU GDPR and AI Act respond to analogous regulatory challenges with binding obligations, institutional regulation and risk classification; and third, to normatively evaluate the AI governance framework in Pakistan against the international human rights standards, specifically, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the EU fundamental rights standards.
The methodological approach of the study is the doctrinal legal analysis, the comparative legal research, and normative evaluation of the statutory texts, policy documents, judicial principles, and scholarly literature. The analysis demonstrates that there are considerable regulatory gaps in Pakistan, such as a lack of enforceable limitations on automated decision-making, insufficient transparency and accountability requirements on AI developers and implementers, ineffective redressing of rights infringements, and the absence of an independent regulatory body that has effective powers. The EU model, in its turn, combines the principles of data protection, including lawfulness, minimization of information, and limitation of purpose, transparency, and accountability, and AI-specific risk-based regulation and strong mechanisms of institutional enforcement.
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