Against Automated Fortress Europe

The European Union is building a technological fortress to protect its borders from the “threats” of migrants. In this talk, civil society experts Antonella Napolitano (formerly Privacy International, author of a report for EuroMed Rights) and Fabio Chiusi (AlgorithmWatch) will argue that injecting algorithms and “AI” in border surveillance practices will not “solve” migration” — on the contrary, the EU’s techno-solutionist approach will only further entrench, and even automate, the current dehumanizing and discriminatory status quo against people on the move and their fundamental rights. This will be shown in two ways: 1) by detailing some of the many dystopian EU-funded projects that aim at realising this flawed vision; 2) by denouncing the externalisation of EU borders to unsafe countries in which the rights of migrants are utterly disregarded — including through EU-made “intelligent” tools.