scholarly journals Territorial and Digital Borders and Migrant Vulnerability Under a Pandemic Crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 45-64
Author(s):  
Petra Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Guinea Pigs ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Humanitarian Crises ◽  
Automated Decision Making

AbstractPeople on the move are often left out of conversations around technological development and become guinea pigs for testing new surveillance tools before bringing them to the wider population. These experiments range from big data predictions about population movements in humanitarian crises to automated decision-making in immigration and refugee applications to AI lie detectors at European airports. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen an increase of technological solutions presented as viable ways to stop its spread. Governments’ move toward biosurveillance has increased tracking, automated drones, and other technologies that purport to manage migration. However, refugees and people crossing borders are disproportionately targeted, with far-reaching impacts on various human rights. Drawing on interviews with affected communities in Belgium and Greece in 2020, this chapter explores how technological experiments on refugees are often discriminatory, breach privacy, and endanger lives. Lack of regulation of such technological experimentation and a pre-existing opaque decision-making ecosystem creates a governance gap that leaves room for far-reaching human rights impacts in this time of exception, with private sector interest setting the agenda. Blanket technological solutions do not address the root causes of displacement, forced migration, and economic inequality – all factors exacerbating the vulnerabilities communities on the move face in these pandemic times.

scholarly journals Algorytm jako informacja publiczna w prawie europejskim

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Mazur
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
European Union ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
European Law ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
European Court ◽  
Access Information ◽  
The Right ◽  
Automated Decision Making

The author verifies the hypothesis concerning the possibility of using algorithms – applied in automated decision making in public sector – as information which is subject to the law governing the right to access information or the right to access official documents in European law. She discusses problems caused by the approach to these laws in the European Union, as well as lack of conformity of the jurisprudence between the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.

Can public access to documents support the transparency of automated decision-making? The European Union law perspective

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Mazur
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
European Union ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Eu Law ◽  
The European Union ◽  
European Union Law ◽  
Access Information ◽  
The Right ◽  
Automated Decision Making ◽  
The Impact

ABSTRACT Due to the concerns which are raised regarding the impact of automated decision-making (ADM) on transparency and their potential discriminatory character, it is worth examining the possibility of applying legal measures which could serve to increase transparency of ADM systems. The article explores the possibility to consider algorithms used in ADM systems as documents subjected to the right to access documents in European Union (EU) law. It is focused on contrasting and comparing the approach based on the right to access public documents developed by the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU) with the approach to the right to access public information as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The analysis shows discrepancies in the perspectives presented by these Courts which result in a limited scope of the right to access public documents in EU law. Pointing out these differences may provide a motivation to clarify the meaning of the right to access information in EU law, the CJEU’s approach remaining as for now incoherent. The article presents the arguments for and ways of bringing together the approaches of the CJEU and the ECtHR in the light of a decreasing level of transparency resulting from the use of ADM in the public sector. It shows that in order to ensure compliance with EU law, it is necessary to rethink the role which the right to access information plays in the human rights catalogue.

Technology on the margins: AI and global migration management from a human rights perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Privacy Rights ◽  
International Regulation ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Migration Management ◽  
The Right

Experiments with new technologies in migration management are increasing. From Big Data predictions about population movements in the Mediterranean, to Canada's use of automated decision-making in immigration and refugee applications, to artificial-intelligence lie detectors deployed at European borders, States are keen to explore the use of new technologies, yet often fail to take into account profound human rights ramifications and real impacts on human lives. These technologies are largely unregulated, developed and deployed in opaque spaces with little oversight and accountability. This paper examines how technologies used in the management of migration impinge on human rights with little international regulation, arguing that this lack of regulation is deliberate, as States single out the migrant population as a viable testing ground for new technologies. Making migrants more trackable and intelligible justifies the use of more technology and data collection under the guise of national security, or even under tropes of humanitarianism and development. The way that technology operates is a useful lens that highlights State practices, democracy, notions of power, and accountability. Technology is not inherently democratic and human rights impacts are particularly important to consider in humanitarian and forced migration contexts. An international human rights law framework is particularly useful for codifying and recognising potential harms, because technology and its development is inherently global and transnational. More oversight and issue-specific accountability mechanisms are needed to safeguard fundamental rights of migrants such as freedom from discrimination, privacy rights and procedural justice safeguards such as the right to a fair decision-maker and the rights of appeal.

New Rules for New Tools? Exploitative and Productive Lawfare in the Case of Unpiloted Aircraft

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Connolly
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Side Effect ◽  
Autonomous Vehicles ◽  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
The Core ◽  
Regulatory Challenges

Contemporary shifts in technology are celebrated for empowering human rights defenders and generating prosperity, but they also enable new forms of human rights violations. This article traces the evolving legal and regulatory challenges posed by drones across two distinct waves of debate. The first involved questions about the legality of weaponized drones in foreign airspaces. The second has centered on the domestication of the technology in American and European airspaces. This article argues that the legal gaps exposed in both waves are not an inevitable side effect of drone technology but are the result of key actors opportunistically using new capabilities to exploit existing rules or even to produce new ones—a process known as lawfare. This linkage between technology and lawfare is important because the drone debates encapsulate many of the core challenges surrounding emerging technologies such as algorithmic decision-making, autonomous vehicles, and big data. Lawfare over unpiloted aircraft is a prelude to the struggles ahead.

scholarly journals Forced Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-273
Author(s):  
Joaddan Prisca Kommegni Fongang
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Population Movements ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Ssa Countries

Migration is an important issue in modern international relations. This article discusses the characteristics of forced migration in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Africa is a continent where migration has many species and actively influences the political situation in the countries of the continent. Migration in Africa is caused both by internal problems of the countries (political instability, famine, massacres, military conflicts, disturbance of public order, human rights violations) and external factors. All of these factors provoke mass population movements, forming new configurations of migration processes. At the same time, the fact that most of the migrants, moving to new places of residence, remain on the African continent is often ignored. Frequent causes of migration in Africa are economic factors: imbalances and uneven development, lack of employment opportunities, bad living conditions and low wages. At the same time, people migrate to Africa not only to improve their well-being. Military conflicts, threats to life or human rights violations are extremely common causes of forced migration in Africa. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (2018), more than 80 million Africans emigrated, leaving their country to settle permanently in another. The relevance of the article is due to the increase of forced migration volume in the SSA countries in 2000-2018 and the need to understand the reasons for this process. This article discusses forced migration in SSA countries. Based on the analysis, the main causes of forced migration in the SSA countries are identified, including political instability, famine, military conflicts, human rights violations, deterioration of socioeconomic conditions and the environmental problems in the countries of the region.

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