In a new research report released today, Amnesty International documents in detail how technology is contributing to a growing trend of human rights violations at borders, and urges countries to halt their use of such technologies until they can guarantee that their use does not violate human rights.
The report, titled “Digital Borders: Migration, Technology and Inequality”, outlines how the use of new technologies by both state and non-state actors in migration systems around the world increases the potential for violations of the human rights of people on the move, including the rights to privacy, non-discrimination, equality and to seek asylum.
“Human rights protection must not be sacrificed for private profit,” said Eliza Aspen, a fellow at Amnesty International. “States do not have obligations to private companies, but they do have an obligation to ensure that states and non-state actors respect the human rights of people they travel with.”
These technologies also contribute to exacerbating underlying racial, economic and social inequalities within and across borders. Migrant workers and people with precarious citizenship status are often subject to the same digital surveillance, monitoring and exploitation as asylum seekers and refugees, and are similarly targeted by these technologies because they are unable to escape or seek redress.
According to the briefing, many of the digital tools used to process people movements are developed, sold and deployed by private companies, whose business models are often rooted in the extraction and accumulation of data for commercial purposes.
The invasive nature of these technologies has serious implications for the well-being of people who cross borders in search of safety, and their ability to exercise their right to asylum. Data-intensive technologies used near borders, such as military-grade biometric sensors and drone surveillance, have the potential to inflict further harm on displaced people who are already at risk of exploitation and marginalization as a result of crossing borders to escape dangerous situations within their own country.
“Governments around the world must work to curb the unregulated development and deployment of harmful technologies and meet their obligations under international human rights law to protect the rights of refugees and migrants,” Aspen said. “Companies that develop these technologies must build safeguards into their use and conduct human rights due diligence and data impact assessments before deployment, not after abuses have already occurred.”
The briefing follows a report released by Amnesty earlier this month into the use of the CBP One mobile app, which also found the app was facilitating abuse of people seeking asylum in the US.
Amnesty International is calling on governments and companies to address systemic racism in their border control strategies and to halt the development of any invasive technologies that put people at risk.
