Using technology to draw borders: fundamental rights for the Smart Borders initiative

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the primary fundamental rights concerns related to biometrics and their use in automated border controls (ABCs), as well as how these issues converge in the European Commission’s Smart Borders proposal. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on extensive background research and qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2013 for the European Union (EU) FP-7 project “FastPass – A harmonized, modular reference system for all European automatic border crossing points”. Findings – The Smart Borders proposal not only compounds the individual concerns related to the use of biometrics in border controls and automatisation thereof, but also has serious issues of its own, premier among which is the imposition of a two-tier border control system. Social implications – The paper is a catalyst for open debate on the fundamental questions of how we got to this point and where do we want to go. It questions the process by which the increased use of IT in border controls has become the norm and policy trend in Europe, and discusses where the limits could be drawn from a fundamental rights perspective. In particular, it warns against the institutionalisation of a two-tier border control system among third-country nationals. Originality/value – Little attention is given to the fundamental rights concerns raised for EU and non-EU citizens as related to biometrics and their use in ABCs, and how these issues are reproduced in the Smart Borders proposal. The paper fills this gap by taking a bottom-up approach: examining the implications of individual elements of the proposal to see their impact on the broader policy.

Information Borderlands in the U.S. Southwest

“…Fourth, the ethics of border technologies and the role played by data policies in migrant deaths and intrusive documentary regimes can be studied by researchers in information ethics, critical data studies, and infrastructure studies. There is already growing interest in this area, e.g., the ethics of border technologies (Hendow et al, 2015); data governance across borders (Metcalfe & Dencik, 2019); algorithms, AI, automation, and ethics of border enforcement (Hendow et al, 2015; Lara, 2022; Sánchez‐Monedero & Dencik, 2022); the data privacy of migrants (Vannini et al, 2020); and experiences of surveillance (Newell et al, 2017). Applying these approaches to borderlands research will provide an important perspective on how data are collected and used by governments to establish regions of data hegemony, power and control.…”

Suspicious Infrastructures: Automating Border Control and the Multiplication of Mistrust through Biometric E-Gates

“…Border guards' attention should instead be directed towards screening and interrogating more complex cases, while ABC is meant to expedite the majority of nonsuspicious border crossings. Last but not least, proponents of ABC even claim that automated processes could make border control less discriminatory, as personal biases seem to be excluded in the algorithmic processing of travellers' identities in e-gates (Hendow, Cibea, and Kraler 2015).…”