A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Senior Research Associates, Refugee Research Centre, School of Oxford
Increasingly, technology and methods are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These range from biometric matching applications that examine iris works and fingerprints to internet directories for refugees and political refugees to chatbots to help people signup protection situations. These tools are created to make it easier pertaining to states and agencies to process asylum applications, especially as much systems are slowed down as a result of COVID-19 outbreak and elevating levels of compelled displacement.
However they raise a number of human legal rights concerns. Like for example , privacy issues, opaque decision-making, and portals of the board of directors for advising migrant workers the potential for biases or machine errors which may lead to discriminatory outcomes. Additionally they pose significant issues to migrant workers and refugees, who are frequently already disenfranchised and susceptible.
Ozkul’s homework explores the ways in which fresh technologies may be used to verify identities and narratives of migrants, allowing them to quicken their asylum application process. It also examines the ways in which these technologies can create a certain informational space around migrant workers, and how they configure all their subjecthood. Subsequent Foucault, your woman argues that such methods are both local and institutional. For example , iris scanning methods can be seen because an institutional technology, as they require the migrant to a specific terrain in order to be recognised; while advice algorithms are business and global in their effects, configuring subjects as consumers.
As a result, they will enact a specific form of hegemonic power more than displaced persons. This is especially true given the current race to the bottom level in asylum policy – with some countries offering incentives like the Nansen passport to aid cachette resettling and others imposing restrictive insurance policies that block the access to territory and power them straight into dangerous and deadly trips.