A/75/590 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 p ersons to this experimentation, raising serious concerns about discriminatory structures of vulnerability. 39. One submission drew attention to iBorderCtrl (the Intelligent Portable Border Control System), part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Programm e, which “aims to enable faster and thorough border control for third -country nationals crossing the land borders of European Union member States”. 106 iBorderCtrl uses hardware and software technologies that seek to automate border surveillance. 107 Among its features, the system undertakes automated deception detection. 108 The European Union has piloted this lie detector at airports in Greece, Hungary and Latvia. 109 Reportedly, in 2019 iBorderCtrl was tested at the Serbian-Hungarian border and failed. 110 iBorderCtrl exemplifies the trend of experimenting surveillance and other technologies on asylum seekers, based on scientifically dubious grounds. 111 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. 112 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. 113 40. 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. 114 A 2018 University of Toronto report examined the human rights risks of using artificial intelligence (AI) to replace or augment i mmigration decisions, noting that these processes created a laboratory for high-risk experiments within an already highly discretionary and opaque system. 115 The ramifications of using automated decision-making in the immigration and refugee context are far-reaching. Although the Government of Canada has confirmed that this type of technology is confined only to augmenting human decision-making and is reserved for certain immigration applications only, there is no legal mechanism in place protecting non -citizens’ procedural rights and preventing human rights abuses from occurring. Similar visa algorithms are currently in use in the United Kingdom and have been ch allenged in __________________ 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 20-14872 Submission by Privacy International et al. For general information about the project, see European Commission, “Smart lie -detection system to tighten EU’s busy borders” (24 October 2018), available at https://ec.europa.eu/ research/infocentre/. =49726. Submission by Privacy International et al. Submission by Maat for Peace, Development and Human Rights. See also Petra Molnar, “Technology on the margins: AI and global migration management from a human rights perspective” (2019); and submission by Minority Rights Group International. Submission by Privacy International et al. Ibid. Submission by Minority Rights Group International. See www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12026585 . Petra Molnar and Lex Gill, “Bots at the gate: a human rights analysis of automated decision making in Canada’s immigration and refugee system”, Citizen Lab and International Human Rights Program, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, Research Report No. 114 (September 2018). Ibid. 17/25