Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship
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more systematically. First, international humanitarian officers are not directly
accountable to any State where they operate, meaning that their liability and
subjection to prosecution for e.g. willingly providing false information – or accepting
bribes – are unclear. Second, just like in many other sectors, humanitarian appointments tend to be shorter and shorter, due to generational job casualisation but
also increased mobility, project fragmentation, overreliance on private philanthropy, and funding uncertainty; this means that controversies or follow-ups are not
necessarily viable from a practical standpoint. Third, and perhaps most saliently,
humanitarian personnel faces increasing political backlash – when not wholesale
criminalisation – Ferstman (2019) by the entire political spectrum of most “developed” countries, and especially by their right-wing (or conservative) parties, who are
concerned about the State losing grip over its borders and on retaining the ultimate
decision over a person’s admission into its territory. In between apathy and desuetude (Gleichert 2020), the Refugee Convention and corollary obligations (for those
States which have undertaken them) are the subject of long-standing controversy, to
the extent that it appears unlikely that UNHCR officers alone could guarantee for
refugee’s identity without the involvement of key individuals (not necessarily
governmental ones!) from the “sending country” – and the “pulling country” alike.
As I will expound infra for other “borderline citizens” just as much, one of the
challenges then is to persuade third parties to “take the risk” of aiding a refugee’s
remote onboarding without assurances that such parties (i.e. the introducers) would
not be registered as well. The reasons why introducers would prefer to go unrecorded are several and perhaps mostly obvious: if they are summoned by the pulling
country, they risk being identified as “immigration aiders/supporters” or even face
detention risks for complicity (e.g. “aiding and abetting”) with illegal migration
schemes; if, instead, they come from the sending country (or from within the same
region), they might not want to risk their own immigration standing in the new
country, and/or they might be escaping from the same source of persecution – that
will hopefully renounce to extending its reach over them, if they go unnoticed for
long enough and have left no family members back there.
5 Borderline Citizenship, Second Scenario:
Internal Displacement
Internally displaced persons (IDPs) are those who are forced to leave their habitual
place of residency but are yet to cross an international border. Notably, due to the
vastness of some of the most politically unstable and environmentally exploited