How would you explain to your client that the court had disregarded an argument about the conditions in which they might be imprisoned because it could not verify the conclusions you had drawn from a ChatGPT translation? Would pointing out that the court had not identified a single mistranslation make that conversation any easier?
In an interim decision delivered on 16 January 2025 (ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2025:326), the Amsterdam District Court disregarded just such an argument. Defence counsel had used ChatGPT to translate a Polish report about Tarnów prison and relied on it in his written submissions, asking the court to put questions to the Polish authorities about the conditions there. The court replied that it could not verify his conclusions without an official translated version issued by the reporting body or a Dutch translation prepared by a sworn translator. Counsel’s explanation at the hearing of how he had translated the report took his argument no further.
For lawyers using AI translation, the absence of a proven linguistic error offers very little comfort here. Even where a lawyer feels confident that a document has been translated accurately, its contents still have to be established on a basis the court is prepared to act upon. Because counsel had already built his written submissions around the ChatGPT translation, the court’s inability to verify those conclusions meant the submission went nowhere. How much preparation are you willing to commit to an AI translation before establishing whether it can serve the procedural purpose you have in mind?
What counsel was asking the court to do
The proceedings concerned Poland’s request for the surrender of a Polish national under a European Arrest Warrant to serve a two-year custodial sentence. Counsel relied on a Polish-language report from Poland’s National Mechanism for the Prevention of Torture, referred to in the judgment as the NMPT. According to his submission, the report described human rights violations embedded in the prison system at Tarnów. Arguing that his client faced a general danger of human rights violations if detained there, counsel asked the court to seek further information before deciding on surrender.
At the hearing, counsel explained that he had translated the Polish report using ChatGPT and that the conclusions set out in his written submissions followed from that translation. The court’s response was brief: “De rechtbank kan dit echter niet controleren”, meaning that it could not verify this, expressly noting the absence of either an official translation issued by the NMPT or a Dutch translation by a sworn translator. The court was being asked to act on counsel’s understanding of a Polish report without either form of verification.
Counsel was asking the court to make further enquiries rather than inviting it to treat the report as conclusive proof and refuse surrender immediately. Even for that preliminary investigative step, however, his account of the report’s contents proved insufficient, and the court passed over the Tarnów argument. While the proceedings continued on other grounds and this interim ruling did not finally determine whether surrender would take place, there is no need to overstate the procedural outcome; losing consideration of a submission on detention conditions is consequential enough in its own right.
What makes the ruling particularly instructive is the court’s treatment of another Polish prison, Barczewo, elsewhere in the same judgment. There, the court was able to quote English-language passages from NMPT reports describing serious allegations of ill-treatment, examine what those passages supported, and put further questions to the Polish authorities. The same chamber was plainly prepared to investigate concerns about Polish detention conditions where it could examine the underlying material for itself. For Tarnów, the obstacle arose at an earlier stage, when the court needed a verifiable basis for what the Polish report actually said.
What, exactly, was the court supposed to rely on?
The institutional standing of the NMPT could not solve the translation problem. An official monitoring body can be responsible for its Polish report without bearing any responsibility for a version someone else generates using ChatGPT. Unless a lawyer relying on an AI-generated version can establish how the author’s findings have been conveyed, the authority of the original body lends a false appearance of weight to wording it has neither supplied nor approved. Why should a court treat the two as interchangeable?
Once a translation has informed written submissions, counsel has already selected what appears relevant and framed the legal argument around it. Any difficulty in understanding the original text is by then woven into the submission itself, where a careful reading of counsel’s prose will not necessarily reveal it. An argument can read with complete internal coherence on the assumption that the underlying report says what counsel believes it says, yet the court still requires a dependable way to test that assumption.
The rest of the Amsterdam judgment illustrates why the precise wording of the NMPT reports required close inspection. When assessing material on other prisons, the court distinguished accounts of isolated incidents from indications of structural problems, and those distinctions governed whether further enquiries to the Polish authorities were warranted. Assessing whether a report makes a firm finding or describes a continuing practice requires a translation that allows the court to examine the text closely, including where the wording may be less helpful to the party relying on it.
I am not suggesting that ChatGPT confused any of those distinctions in the Tarnów report. The translation does not appear in the judgment, and the court identifies no linguistic error. That silence, however, provides no reassurance about how the submission was prepared. Because the court expressly stated that it could not verify counsel’s conclusions, treating the absence of an identified mistranslation as proof that the translation worked would assume that the very check the court could not perform had somehow been completed.
Suppose someone responds to this decision by asking where the mistranslation was. A judge who cannot read the Polish original is in no position to point to a specific linguistic error, which is the very reason the court requires a verifiable translation in the first place. Expecting the bench to demonstrate a translation mistake before counsel has established a satisfactory basis for the document’s meaning puts the burden upside down. In Amsterdam, the court simply declined to proceed on the basis supplied.
The form of the translation was part of the problem
The court’s reference to a sworn translator deserves more than a passing nod to human review. A lawyer who responds to this judgment by asking a bilingual colleague to cast an eye over future ChatGPT outputs could easily meet the same objection at the next hearing. The court specified an official NMPT translation or a sworn Dutch translation, making no mention of informal internal review. Anyone deciding how to prepare a foreign-language report for court needs to consider what form of translation the tribunal will accept, alongside who is qualified to assess its wording.
At the same time, the court’s willingness to quote English-language NMPT material concerning Barczewo shows that its objection to the Tarnów submission cannot be reduced to a rigid rule that every foreign document must be translated into the language of the court by a sworn translator. Nor did the court have occasion to consider what would happen if a sworn translator used AI tools while taking formal professional responsibility for the resulting text. Those wider questions did not arise; what was missing before the court in this case was stated plainly enough.
A sworn translator can, of course, make an error, and any specific challenge to an official or sworn translation would require proper examination. Yet the fallibility of human translators does not explain why counsel’s unverified ChatGPT account should have sufficed in Amsterdam. Pointing to the possibility of error elsewhere leaves the court’s difficulty untouched, just as a lawyer in any other context would never expect uncertainty about hypothetical evidence to establish the reliability of their own.
Could the court have adjourned or sought a suitable translation of its own motion before setting the Tarnów argument aside? The brief passage in the judgment does not canvas that possibility, though where a submission concerns potential ill-treatment in detention, it is a question worth asking. Equally, we do not know why counsel turned to ChatGPT or what time and financial pressures surrounded the preparation of the defence, so attributing the choice to corner-cutting would be unfair speculation. Even so, none of those considerations helps a lawyer who arrives at a hearing hoping the court will find a way around a translation problem.
Counsel had already relied on it
In my recent discussion of VA v JL, I questioned a New Zealand Review Officer’s reliance on ChatGPT-translated correspondence where the published decision did not explain how the accuracy of the English wording had been established. The Amsterdam ruling shows the other side of the coin: when a court expressly confronts the verification problem and finds no dependable basis for checking the AI translation, it disregards the argument built upon it. Although the two sets of proceedings are very different, both point to the same underlying question for practitioners: how do you expect a decision-maker to verify the meaning you attribute to a foreign-language document?
By the time a lawyer advances submissions on a foreign document at a hearing, an assumption about what that document says has already shaped client advice and case strategy. Discovering at the hearing that the court cannot verify the translation undercuts work already done. I would want to know, well before committing an argument to paper, whether the translation on which it rests will withstand the court’s scrutiny.
An initial machine translation may help a lawyer see whether a foreign report is worth investigating further. Once counsel decides to rely on that report in court, however, securing a translation that satisfies the court’s evidential threshold forms part of preparing the submission itself. Waiting until the hearing to find out whether the court will accept a ChatGPT translation leaves the client exposed to a wholly avoidable procedural risk, and having located a potentially valuable report offers scant consolation if the way it is put before the court prevents the argument from being heard.
The Amsterdam judgment does not tell us whether a sworn or official translation of the Tarnów report would have persuaded the court to put further questions to the Polish authorities. It tells us only that the submission advanced on the basis of counsel’s ChatGPT translation was disregarded. That is the practical reality a lawyer using AI translation needs to weigh before the next hearing, with their client’s position firmly in mind.
Before relying on a translated document in court, can you explain both how the translation was produced and why the judge is entitled to rely on it?
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