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Content type: News & Analysis
26th August 2020
A new report by the UN Working Group on mercenaries analyses the impact of the use of private military and security services in immigration and border management on the rights of migrants, and highlights the responsibilities of private actors in human rights abuses as well as lack of oversight and, ultimately, of accountability of the system.
Governments worldwide have prioritised an approach to immigration that criminalises the act of migration and focuses on security.
Today, borders are not…
Content type: News & Analysis
22nd July 2020
The UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Professor Fionnuala Ní Aoláin together with Dr. Krisztina Huszti-Orbán, released today a key report on the “Use of Biometric Data to Identify Terrorists: Best Practice or Risky Business?”.
The report explores the human rights risks involved in the deployment of biometrics emphasising that
in the absence of robust rights protections which are institutionally embedded…
Content type: News & Analysis
11th March 2020
Unlikely as it may seem, the UN institution that has one of the greatest potential to impact upon people’s rights around the world is now the UN Statistics Division. And why is that?
Last week, they had a crucial meeting where they endorsed the UN’s Legal Identity Agenda and the UN’s Legal Identity Task Force. The stakes could hardly be higher. One of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 16.9, states that “by 2030 provide legal identity for all including free birth registrations”. As…
Content type: Long Read
3rd March 2020
The UK’s Metropolitan Police have began formally deploying Live Facial Recognition technology across London, claiming that it will only be used to identify serious criminals on “bespoke ‘watch lists’” and on “small, targeted” areas.
Yet, at the same time, the UK’s largest police force is also listed as a collaborator in a UK government-funded research programme explicitly intended to "develop unconstrained face recognition technology", aimed “at making face recognition ubiquitous by 2020". …
Content type: Long Read
28th January 2020
It was a quiet evening in Agadez, a bustling Saharan city in the centre of Niger. Thirty-five year old Agali Ahmed was sipping tea at a friend’s place, as he often did, when he received a message: police were at his uncle’s house. When he got there, Ahmed saw men in plainclothes, standing around the building’s gate. Inside, more men were searching the apartment. Three white men, who Ahmed guessed were Spanish, asked for his phone and started taking pictures of him. They told him to follow them…