Digital surveillance tech facilitates ‘arbitrary’ border abuses

The sharing of digital surveillance technologies by states looking to outsource their asylum and migration processes is contributing to human rights violations against people on the move, says United Nations special rapporteur.

Known as border “externalisation”, Gehad Madi, the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, said outsourcing these processes forms part of a “deterrence-based” approach to migration that focuses on restricting access to protections and reducing the ability of people to cross state borders.

He added that externalisation measures, while often framed as forms of cooperation or partnership, should be distinguished from cooperation aimed at facilitating safe and regular migration.

This is because, in practice, externalising states looking to shift their migration control functions and responsibilities onto third countries are actively seeking to either prevent or remove migrants, “practices that may be difficult to reconcile with the principle of good faith”.

While there are many facets to externalisation – including political agreements between externalising and third countries that ensure extraterritorial processing of asylum claims, introduce prevention arrival frameworks, or expedite migrant removals – one key aspect of this process is the sharing of technologies and technical expertise.

“To support these measures, externalising states provide financial assistance, training, equipment and broader capacity-building to migration and border authorities in third states,” said Madi, adding that such practices are often embedded into the wider cooperation frameworks agreed between states.  

“Increasingly, this includes the deployment of surveillance technologies, such as biometric systems, drones and border-monitoring tools, facilitating the tracking and interception of migrants.”

The use of such digital technologies in the context of externalisation, Madi noted, may facilitate the violation of human rights in a number of ways.

Highlighting the use of drones as an example, Madi said these can be deployed in ways that undermine a person’s right to leave a country or contribute to state refoulement practices (referring to the forcible return, expulsion, or rejection of migrants).

On the collection of personal data by border monitoring or management systems, Madi added that these may give rise to privacy violations protected by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The export and deployment of various digital technologies, “in light of systemic discrimination embedded in migration governance” globally, also contribute to the creation and maintenance of racialised “mobility hierarchies” and discriminatory enforcement practices, resulting in the racial profiling or disproportionate targeting of migrants from the global South.

Alongside state actors, Madi also noted the role of international organisations – including the UN, which helps run biometric surveillance systems and databases in refugee camps, such as those in Kenya and Bangladesh – and private entities like technology firms, which either assist directly with externalisation measures or provide tools that enable authorities to enact them.

Speaking with Computer Weekly in November 2024, refugee lawyer and author Petra Molnar said that third sector and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are often involved in creating the “humanitarian” justifications for increasing border tech deployments.

Although people working in these organisations are often well-intentioned, Molnar said international organisations such as the UN, Unicef or the World Food Programme have “huge normative power” over the idea that “more data is better”, and are therefore a driving force behind normalising a lot of the border tech currently in use.

In February 2021, Privacy International also raised concerns about the increasingly privatised nature of the UK’s border regime, noting that these companies are rarely scrutinised or held accountable for their involvement, despite their enthusiastic provision of “intrusive surveillance powers”.

A report from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre further found in September 2022 that surveillance technology companies were “deeply implicated” in human rights abuses against migrants across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Specifically, it found that the companies involved operate with a distinct lack of transparency, and have failed to establish adequate grievance mechanisms for those affected by their products, noting that governments in the MENA region were increasingly “purchasing and using powerful digital tools, ranging from spyware and wiretapping tools to facial recognition technology, for targeted and mass surveillance”.

In December 2022, a year-long investigation by the European Ombudsman found that transfers of surveillance technology from the European Union (EU) to African governments – distributed via the bloc’s multibillion-euro Trust Fund for Africa (EUTFA) – are carried out without any meaningful assessment of the human rights impacts, despite the poor human rights records of many of the governments receiving the tech.

Under the EUTFA, millions were allocated to African governments to provide them with digital tools to collect data from devices and build mass-scale biometric ID systems, while other funds have been used to train police in North Africa on wiretapping, monitoring social media users and decrypting intercepted internet content.

A previous analysis of surveillance laws and practices in six African countries – conducted by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the African Digital Rights Network (ADRN) in October 2021 – separately found that illegal state surveillance was being carried out with “impunity”, despite privacy rights being well protected on paper.

Madi concluded that externalisation measures, whether technical or not, “are prone to human rights violations due to their arbitrary and deterrent nature”.

He added that “limited transparency is a recurring feature of externalisation cooperation, due to its extraterritorial nature and the involvement of multiple actors”, noting that the increasing use of surveillance technologies is further hindering oversight.

To uphold their human rights obligations in the context of migration cooperation and technology transfers, Madi said states should be able to guarantee that the use, transfer and deployment of digital surveillance tools comply with international human rights law.

This should be accompanied by increased transparency and oversight, with mechanisms in place to suspend the use of technologies in situations where the human rights risks cannot be effectively mitigated.