Surveilling Europe’s edges: when digitalisation means dehumanisation

In May 2024, just a few weeks after the new EU Pact on Migration and Asylum was approved, I travelled to Greece to see for myself how digital surveillance is being deployed against migrant people as they try to enter Europe. What quickly became clear on the ground was how the digitalisation of border management is a key part of the dehumanisation process inherent within the EU’s migration policy.

As the Equinox Initiative for Racial Justice has pointed out, the EU’s “Fortress Europe” approach treats every migrant as a security threat by default, implying that they are “racially different, inferior, and a threat to the European project” — and technology is deployed at the borders with this in mind. But in contrast to claims that such digital tools are “neutral” or “objective,” the use of automatic decision-making and surveillance technology has been shown to reinforce existing inequalities, and to punish already systematically oppressed people.

Violating migrants’ fundamental rights has become progressively automated and normalised, and as I saw for myself, Greece has been a testing ground of this process for quite some time.

I first visited Thessaloniki, Greece’s second-largest city, where I met with migrants’ rights organisations that support people seeking safety in Greece, despite the growing criminalisation of solidarity. One of these organisations is Mobile Info Team, which has been providing legal assistance to undocumented migrants and people seeking asylum since 2016.

They shared insights into the Greek government’s ongoing efforts to implement its Digital Transformation Bible 2020-2025, which also impacts the immigration and asylum system. This involves several projects, notably the expansion of the national migration database and its interoperability with police information systems (Alkyoni II), the set-up of digital surveillance infrastructure in migrant detention camps (Centaurus), and the introduction of a biometric surveillance system to track access in reception and detention facilities (Hyperion), which affects migrants as well as Greek and international workers.

These projects are implemented with the intent of “effectively managing migration flows,” but protecting people’s human rights does not appear to be a priority. This should come as no surprise; with the Greek government proudly advancing the EU’s plan to seal its borders, the digitalisation process has become a technological means to punish people who dare to seek safety inside them.

The adoption of the widely-celebrated EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, which consolidates this punitive approach and will usher in a deadly new era of digital surveillance, led me to think back to my first visit to Greece in 2016, when another pivotal shift on EU migration policy took place — one which laid the foundations for today’s Pact. The so-called EU-Turkey deal, signed in March 2016, made it a crime to cross the Aegean sea in search of safety, and led the EU to pour billions of euros into Turkey and border patrolling programmes. Barely a month earlier, the EU had forced North Macedonia to shut its border with Greece, thereby trapping more than 35,000 people beyond its borders.

These policies represented a key milestone in the EU’s long-conceived yet discriminatory plan to control certain people’s movements, which is itself rooted in the continent’s colonial history. It cemented the carceral approach as a cornerstone of European migration policy, establishing de facto prison-like detention centres to detain asylum seekers trapped on Greek islands, and helped normalise the idea that migrant and racialised people are less worthy of human rights.

In fact, with Brussels’ blessing, recent years have seen Greece invest massively in the digitalisation of asylum procedures, the roll-out of so-called “research programmes” for testing border surveillance systems, and the construction of high-tech detention centres, some of which I saw during my visit.

My visit left me with two main takeaways on the devastating impact of digitalising asylum procedures:

1.  Human rights are sacrificed at the altar of “innovation”
   
   Around the world, digital “innovation” is often promoted as a solution for improving access to public services, even as it instead acts as a harmful tool for exclusion. The digitalisation of Greek asylum procedures has followed this tired pattern.During several months in 2023, asylum seekers were unable to register their asylum claims due to a temporary shutdown of the asylum service’s database, Alkyoni, placing those affected at heightened risk of detention and deportation. Migrant rights groups criticised not only the government’s slow response, but also the overall opacity behind the digitalisation of asylum procedures.Meanwhile, in April 2024, the Ministry of Migration was fined by the Greek Data Protection Authority for breaching several data protection rules when installing surveillance systems in migrant detention camps (under the afore-mentioned Centaur and Hyperion projects).

   Even as asylum seekers live in dire and degrading conditions, public resources are wasted on hastily and poorly conceived,  malfunctioning digital programs; demonstrating once again that when it comes to migrants, human rights come second to the “need” to innovate at all cost.

2. Digitalising asylum procedures creates more exclusionWhile the asylum application may be portrayed as an apparently neutral administrative procedure, it is in fact an inherently violent and racist process, aimed at distinguishing between the people who deserve protection, and those who do not.Existing asylum rules already discriminate against people coming from countries deemed to be “safe” and the digitalisation of the asylum process as foreseen in the new Pact on Migration will only deepen this bias. Asylum seekers will be automatically screened against security databases and risk indicators to calculate their worthiness to access the asylum system, thereby further automating suspicion of migrants and transforming people’s unique, often deeply traumatic, individual stories into mere data points.On my last day in Thessaloniki I visited the volunteer-run Wave Community centre, which provides basic services, including showers and hot meals, to people excluded from the city’s welfare system, such as unhoused or undocumented people. I crossed paths with many people who had had their asylum applications rejected, thereby excluding them from any form of state support, and it occurred to me how many more people will become invisible once the new asylum rules are fully implemented, as the EU tries to push even more people to the margins of its borders.

What European policymakers need to know — and do

Given how the use of automated decision-making and surveillance technology perpetuates structural oppression, discrimination, and exclusion of migrant and racialised people, and considering how the EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact is only set to worsen this state of affairs, it is vital that EU policymakers:

• Ban the use of inherently harmful AI systems, such as automated profiling systems, emotion recognition, and biometric categorisation, in asylum procedures.
• Re-focus EU migration policy to be based on principles of safety, protection, and justice for migrants and racialised people.
• Stop criminalising the work of human rights groups that support refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants.

In part two of this series, I’ll be exploring the role that EU-funded research projects on border surveillance are playing in legitimising violent migration policies, based on my visit to the Evros region of Greece.

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This article was first published here by EDRi member Access Now.

Contribution by: Caterina Rodelli, EU Policy Analyst, EDRi member, Access Now