12 December 2024
EU’s AI Act and Migration Control. Shortcomings in Safeguarding Fundamental Rights
In the European Union, AI and non-AI technologies are increasingly being used for border and migration control. In this blog, Brouwer argues that the new AI Act, while adding safeguards, falls short of sufficiently protecting fundamental rights. This is due to its blanket exceptions and broad discretion for national and EU agencies to experiment with AI tools when making decisions about migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees. It is therefore important that the general legal framework on fundamental rights continues to be observed. Continue reading >>
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11 May 2023
Challenging Bias and Discrimination in Automated Border Decisions
In Ligue des droits humains, the Court of Justice of the European Union explicitly addresses the fact that the use of AI and self-learning risk models may deprive data subjects of their right to effective judicial protection as enshrined in the Charter. The importance of this judgment cannot be understated for non-EU citizens and at the European borders more generally. Continue reading >>
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08 May 2023
The Future of the European Security Architecture: A Debate Series
This debate series is dedicated to Ligue des Droits Humains – a case in which the Court of Justice of the European Union decided on the fate of one of the main drivers of this development: the Directive on on the use of passenger name record (PNR) data for the prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of terrorist offences and serious crime. The PNR Directive, being one of the first major EU-wide examples of predictive policing, is not just interesting in itself. It exemplifies the emergence and gradual consolidation of a new security architecture in Europe. Continue reading >>24 June 2022
Fundamental Rights at the Digital Border
We are witnessing the emergence of the EU’s ‘digital border’: an ecosystem of interoperable databases to expand the surveillance and control of the movement of third-country nationals. In this blog post, we discuss one of the latest additions to this ecosystem - the European Travel Information and Authorisation System, or ETIAS in short - and argue that the system as it is currently set up violates the right to data protection laid down in Article 8 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, especially in light of the CJEU’s PNR judgment earlier this week. In many ways, we consider ETIAS to be a test case for a much wider roll-out of such often AI-powered technologies in the field of border control. Continue reading >>
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25 May 2019
Interoperability of Databases and Interstate Trust: a Perilous Combination for Fundamental Rights
On 14 May 2019, the Council adopted two regulations, Regulation 2019/817 and Regulation 2019/818, establishing a framework for the interoperability between EU information systems in the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice. The new rules on interoperability, upon which the European Parliament agreed in April 2019, will allegedly provide for easier information sharing and ‘considerably improve security in the EU, allow for more efficient checks at external borders, improve detection of multiple identities and help prevent and combat illegal migration’. All this, according to the press release of the Council, ‘while safeguarding fundamental rights’. It is questionable whether this commitment made by the EU legislator is justified. Continue reading >>
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30 August 2018