Technology and Asylum Procedures

A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Mature Research Fellow, Refugee Research Centre, School of Oxford

Increasingly, systems and algorithms are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These range from biometric matching engines that examine iris scans and fingerprints to web directories for asylum seekers and asylum seekers to chatbots to help people register protection circumstances. These tools are created to make this easier to get states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially as many systems are currently slowed down as a result of COVID-19 outbreak and increasing levels of required displacement.

Nevertheless they raise a number of human legal rights concerns. Some examples are privacy worries, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or equipment errors that may lead to discriminatory outcomes. Additionally, they pose significant conflicts to migrants and asylum seekers, who are often times already voiceless and insecure.

Ozkul’s study explores the ways in which fresh technologies can be used to verify details and narratives of migrant workers, allowing them to improve their asylum application procedure. It also examines the ways through which these systems can create a particular informational space around migrant workers, and how they configure all their subjecthood. Following Foucault, your lady argues that such algorithms are both local and institutional. For example , iris scanning algorithms can be seen when an institutional technology, as they require the migrant to enter a specific place in order to be recognized; while suggestion algorithms are industrial and global in their effects, configuring subjects as customers.

As a result, that they enact a certain form of hegemonic power more than displaced persons. This is especially true offered the current race to the bottom level in asylum policy ~ with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to Read More Here assist in cachette resettling and others imposing restrictive insurance policies that block their access to area and drive them back to dangerous and deadly excursions.