A/Prof Derya Ozkul, Elderly Research Guy, Refugee Research Centre, School of Oxford
Increasingly, systems and algorithms are being used to streamline asylum procedures. These types of range from biometric matching applications that examine iris works and finger prints to websites for asylum seekers and refugees to chatbots to help people signup protection cases. These tools are designed to make it easier meant for states and agencies to process asylum applications, asylum consultation especially as much systems are currently slowed down because of the COVID-19 pandemic and elevating levels of compelled displacement.
However they raise a number of human legal rights concerns. Like for example , privacy problems, opaque decision-making, and the potential for biases or equipment errors which may lead to discriminatory outcomes. Additionally, they pose significant issues to migrants and refugees, who are often already voiceless and weak.
Ozkul’s homework explores the ways in which new technologies may be used to verify identities and narratives of migrants, allowing them to increase their asylum application procedure. It also discusses the ways through which these technologies can create a specific informational space around migrant workers, and how they configure all their subjecthood. Next Foucault, this lady argues that such methods are both local and institutional. For example , eye scanning methods can be seen since an institutional technology, as they require the migrant to a specific territory in order to be recognized; while suggestion algorithms are commercial and global in their effects, configuring people as buyers.
As a result, they will enact a specific form of hegemonic power over displaced people. This is especially true provided the current contest to the underlying part in asylum policy – with some countries offering offers like the Nansen passport to accomplish cachette resettling and others awe-inspiring restrictive policies that block the access to terrain and power them straight into dangerous and deadly travels.
