A/HRC/48/Add.xx office that administers health care for the undocumented has a duty to report their personal data to immigration authorities under section 87 of the Residence Act, which governs the “transfer of data and information for foreign authorities” by all public authorities. 106 This means legally accessing healthcare may result in immigration enforcement, which likely has a chilling effect on migrant and refugees’ use of even emergency healthcare. 2 Technological Experimentation 42. Submissions raise serious concerns with the widespread technological experimentation conducted by state and non-state actors on refugees, migrants, and stateless persons. This experimentation involves testing of various technological products under circumstances where targeted groups have limited or no means of providing informed consent, and where the human rights consequences of the testing and experimentation are negative or unknown. Typically, refugees, migrants and stateless persons have no or very limited recourse for challenging this technological experimentation and the human rights violations that may be associated with it. Furthermore, it is national origin and citizenship/immigration status that exposes refugees, migrants and stateless persons to this experimentation, raising serious concerns about discriminatory structures of vulnerability. 43. One submission called attention to the EU’s Horizon 2020’s iBorderCtrl, an “Intelligent Portable Control System” that “aims to enable faster and thorough border control for third country nationals crossing the land borders of EU Member States”107 iBorderCtrl uses hardware and software technologies that seek to automate border surveillance.108 Among its features, the system undertakes automated deception detection. 109 The EU has piloted this lie detector at airports in Greece, Hungary and Latvia.110 Reportedly, in 2019 iBorderCtrl was tested at the Serbian-Hungarian border and failed.111 iBorderCtrl exemplifies the trend of experimenting surveillance and other technologies on asylum seekers based on scientifically dubious grounds.112 Drawing upon the contested theory of “affect recognition science,” iBorderCtrl replaces human border guards with a facial recognition system that scans for facial anomalies while travellers answer a series of questions. 113 Other countries such as New Zealand are also experimenting with using automated facial recognition technology to identify so-called future “troublemakers,” which has prompted civil society organizations to mount legal challenges on grounds of discrimination and racial profiling. 114 Canada and Romania have also experimented with similar “emotion-recognition” projects for border screening.115 44. States are currently experimenting with automating various facets of immigration and asylum decision making. For example, since at least 2014, Canada has used some form of automated decision-making in its immigration and refugee system.116 A 2018 University of Toronto report examined the human rights risks of using AI to replace or augment immigration decisions, noting that these processes “create a laboratory for high-risk experiments within an already highly discretionary and opaque system.”117 The ramifications of using automated decision making in the immigration and refugee context are far-reaching. Although the Canadian government has confirmed that this type of technology is confined only to augmenting human decision-making and reserved for certain immigration 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 14 Ibid. PI et al., Submission. See https://www.iborderctrl.eu/The-project. PI et al., Submission. Maat for Peace, Development & Human Rights (“Maat for Peace”), Submission. See also Petra Molnar, “Technology at the Margins: The Human Rights Impacts of AI in Migration Management” (2019); MRG, Submission. PI et al., Submission. Ibid. MRG, Submission. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12026585. https://edri.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Technological-Testing-Grounds.pdf. Petra Molnar & Lex Gill, “Bots at the Gate: A Human Rights Analysis of Automated DecisionMaking in Canada’s Immigration and Refugee System” (2018). Molnar & Gill.