INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY Rohingya communities have been arbitrarily deprived of their nationality and persecuted in Myanmar, while also being denied adequate protection as refugees and stateless persons in neighbouring countries. At the centre of their insecurities and vulnerabilities, is a lack of legal status as citizens in Myanmar, and as residents, refugees and stateless persons elsewhere. For over 30 years, Rohingya in Myanmar have been subject to one of the world’s most oppressive registration and surveillance systems, the ultimate aim of which has been to exclude and persecute. In other countries, they have been left out of civil documentation procedures in order to deny them a legal status and thus avoid state responsibility. In more recent times, national personal identification systems are increasingly moving from the paper-based to digital; bringing opportunities to protect, but also potential to entrench exclusion, denial and persecution. The central message of this paper is the urgent imperative to learn from the past and from other contexts, before it is too late. The lessons flowing from previous failures of the international community to protect the Rohingya, and the warning signs emerging from premature attempts to roll out digital ID elsewhere, without first ensuring that the right law and policy framework is in place, must be listened to. The political, economic, institutional and pragmatic reasons to downplay or dismiss such warnings can be immense, but the cost of doing so is likely to be greater still. The Rohingya have endured unthinkable atrocities over many decades, and the world owes it to them to at least now, put a premium on their safety, security, dignity and equality. This Briefing Paper contextualises Rohingya human rights and protection concerns within the global trajectory towards legal identities for all and the increased digitisation of identification systems. The paper relates Rohingya experiences of registration systems to wider human rights challenges around racial and xenophobic discrimination,1 digital technologies and borders, as articulated in a recent report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Special Rapporteur on Racism’):² The paper, which focuses primarily on the situation in India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, also draws on the consultations related to the thematic report on Race, Borders and Digital Technologies presented to the United Nation's General Assembly 2020 by the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism.⁴ ISI assisted the Special Rapporteur on Racism to organise consultations with experts by experience, academics and practitioners in the statelessness, refugee rights and migrant rights fields. Two of the authors of this report directly participated in the Special Rapporteur on Racism’s consultation process, while others made submissions to it. These consultations drew attention to how bordering technologies can compound statelessness and impact the human rights of stateless persons by furthering exclusion and discrimination and extending state surveillance capacities. Drawing on some of the issues highlighted during the consultation, this paper considers in more detail the use of digitised registration and biometric ID cards as bordering technologies and how these technologies impact stateless communities.⁵ In doing so, it considers the experiences and concerns of Rohingya, as one stateless community, in different national contexts which are at various different stages of digitising ID cards and national and refugee registration. “ Governments and non-state actors are developing and deploying emerging digital technologies in ways that are uniquely experimental, dangerous, and discriminatory in the border and immigration enforcement context. By so doing, they are subjecting refugees, migrants, stateless persons and others to human rights violations, and extracting large quantities of data from them on exploitative terms that strip these groups of fundamental human agency and dignity.³ Methodology and Approach TENDAYI ACHIUME ¹ Under international human rights law, prohibited racial discrimination is defined broadly to include discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin[.]” International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Article 1.1. ² Ms. E. Tendayi Achiume, Report of the Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, A/75/590 (November 2020) available at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/racism/srracism/pages/indexsrracism.aspx [accessed 13/11/2020] ³ This paper is based on the information provided during the webinar and focus groups. It does not include desk-based research. ³ Ibid ⁴ Ibid 3