Explanation as a legal right beyond the GDPR: Toward a jurisdictionally pluralist framework for algorithmic accountability

Abstract

Public authorities increasingly rely on computational systems to shape decisions affecting legally significant interests, yet the notice communicating the outcome may reveal little about the grounds on which public power was actually exercised. European data-protection law has supplied much of the contemporary vocabulary for addressing this problem, but explanation in public administration may also arise from constitutional, administrative, and regulatory sources that do not reproduce the European model. This article examines when existing public law in Nigeria and the Philippines can require an intelligible and contestable account of an automated public decision and what institutional conditions are necessary to make that obligation effective. Using a comparative doctrinal method confined to decisions attributable to public authorities, it treats European Union (EU) law as a reference framework rather than a template for statutory transplantation. The analysis conceptualizes explanation as a legal process through which the material role of automation becomes visible, the grounds of an individual decision become intelligible, and those grounds can be used within existing procedures of correction or review. The effectiveness of that process depends on institutions capable of preserving the decisional record, obtaining relevant technical information, and supporting meaningful human and independent scrutiny. Nigeria provides an express statutory safeguard for solely automated significant decisions under the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023, reinforced by fair-hearing doctrine and more recent implementation requirements, but the content of a decision-specific explanation remains comparatively underdeveloped. Philippine law distributes explanatory protection differently by combining a narrower statutory access right with a more explicit administrative-law tradition of evidentiary disclosure, independent judgment, and reasoned decision-making, supplemented by recent guidance from the National Privacy Commission on AI governance. Neither jurisdiction presently establishes a comprehensive free-standing right to explanation across all forms of automated public decision-making, but both contain enforceable legal resources capable of supporting context-specific explanation duties. The comparison shows that the practical adequacy of an explanation regime depends less on textual convergence with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) than on whether domestic law makes automated public power sufficiently intelligible, contestable, and institutionally reviewable.