Legal Remedies For a Forgiving Society: Children's rights,data protection rights and the value of forgiveness in AI-mediated risk profiling of children by Dutch authorities

30 years after the United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) and two years after the new EU data protection regime, the social value of forgiveness is not part of these legal instruments. The lack of this value within these legal instruments and the lack of research on the subject of forgiveness in relation to improving the legal position of children require urgent addressing especially when children are exposed to artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated risk profiling practices by Dutch government authorities. Developmental psychologists underline that the erosion of this value could hamper children's ability to develop flourishing human relationships.This article contributes to fill this niche. It investigates how this value can be enforced in order to benefit children below the age of 12 years that are exposed to risk profiling by Dutch law enforcement and youth care authorities. Children who are victims, witnesses, or falsely accused provide a particular narrowing of focus in this article as these groups cannot be held responsible for their correlations to crime. Strengthening children's legal position is crucial because their position is much weaker compared to adults when it comes to question a risk correlation about themselves. These children correlated to crime, as this paper argues, not only can feel unjustifiably punished, ‘unforgiven’, and hampered in their choices, but can also develop low self-worth and (negative) judgmental attitudes towards others. Based on input from developmental psychology, empirical material, and legal desk research, this article seeks to answer: What remedies can the Law Enforcement Directive (LED) 2016/680, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and the United Nations Convention on the Right of the Child (CRC) offer against the detrimental implications of risk profiling children by the ProKid 12- SI system and the Crime Anticipation System (CAS) in The Netherlands? How can the social value of forgiveness strengthen these instruments and the legal position of children in light of security interests and the best interests of the child? The analysis concludes that the CRC offers the broadest room for incorporating the principle of forgiveness into balancing tests, but certain LED and GDPR prescriptions could also support the value of forgiveness for children, such as the right to erasure. The analysis concludes that incorporating forgiveness into the mentioned legal instruments would not only benefit individual children but would also foster public safety as a result.