Technology and Asylum Procedures

A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Older Research Fellow, Refugee Studies Centre, University or college of Oxford

Increasingly, technology and methods are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These types of range from biometric matching machines that examine iris scans and fingerprints to websites for asylum seekers and political refugees to chatbots to help people register protection cases. These tools are designed to make that easier designed for states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially several systems are currently slowed find more down because of the COVID-19 pandemic and raising levels of required displacement.

Nevertheless they raise a host of human legal rights concerns. Included in this are privacy considerations, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or equipment errors which may lead to discriminatory outcomes. In addition they pose significant issues to migrants and asylum seekers, who will often be already disenfranchised and weak.

Ozkul’s explore explores the ways in which fresh technologies can be used to verify details and narratives of migrant workers, allowing them to increase their asylum application method. It also discusses the ways by which these solutions can create a certain informational space around migrant workers, and how that they configure the subjecthood. Next Foucault, the girl argues that such methods are both local and institutional. For example , eye scanning methods can be seen mainly because an institutional technology, because they require the migrant to a specific terrain in order to be recognized; while recommendation algorithms are commercial and global in their effects, configuring matters as consumers.

As a result, they enact a particular form of hegemonic power more than displaced people. This is especially true given the current race to the bottom in asylum policy ~ with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to help cachette resettling and others imposing restrictive insurance policies that block their very own access to location and induce them back to dangerous and deadly excursions.