A/75/590 migration in border regions, but that do so without ensuring the requisite legal protections for the human rights of those subject to this surveillance. 22 13. The usage of military, or quasi-military, autonomous technology bolsters the nexus between immigration, national security, and the increasing push towards the criminalization of migration and using risk-based taxonomies to demarcate and flag cases. 23 States, particularly those on the frontiers of large numbers of refugee and migrant arrivals, have been using various ways to pre-empt and deter those seeking to legally apply for asylum. This normative shift towards criminalization of asylum and migration works to justify increasingly hardline and intrusive technologies such as drones and various border enforcement mechanisms like remote sensors and integrated fixed towers with infrared cameras (so-called autonomous surveillance towers) to mitigate the “threat environment” at the border. 24 These technologies can have drastic results. While so-called “smart-border” technologies have been called a more humane alternative to other border enforcement regimes, studies have documented that such technologies along the United States-Mexico border, for example, have actually increased numbers of migrant deaths and pushed migration routes towards more dangerous terrains through the Arizona desert. 25 Samuel Chambers and others have found that migrant deaths have more than doubled since these new technologies have been introduced, 26 creating a “land of open graves”. 27 14. The use of these technologies by border enforcement authorities is only likely to increase in the “militarized technological regime” 28 of border spaces, without appropriate public consultation, accountability frameworks a nd oversight mechanisms. One submission provided an example of the Korean Peninsula’s demilitarized zone where the Republic of Korea had deployed stationary, remote operated semi-autonomous weapons. 29 The Government of the Republic of Korea stated that it had no intent to develop or acquire lethal autonomous weapons systems. 30 Due to a lack of transparency, often the status of autonomous weapons systems’ deployment on borders is difficult to determine. In anticipation of such systems being under way, it is crucial that States account for and combat the disproportionate racial, ethnic and national origin impacts that fully autonomous weapons would have on vulnerable groups, especially refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, stateless persons, and related groups. 15. United Nations member States and numerous organs of the United Nations are increasingly relying on big data analytics to inform their policies. For example, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) Displacement Tracking Matrix 31 monitors populations on the move to better predict the needs of displaced people, using mobile phone call records and geotagging, as well as analyses of social media activity. In the United States of America, big data analytics are also being used to predict likely successful outcomes of resettled refugees based on pre-existing __________________ 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 8/25 Submission by Homo Digitalis. Submission by Dimitri van den Meerssche. Raluca Csernatoni, “Constructing the EU’s high-tech borders: Frontex and dual-use drones for border management”, European Security, vol. 27, No. 2 (2018), pp. 175–200. Samuel Norton Chambers et al., “Mortality, surveillance and the tertiary ‘funnel effect’ on the U.S.-Mexico border: a geospatial modeling of the geography of deterrence”, Journal of Borderlands Studies (2019). Ibid. Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California Press, 2015). Raluca Csernatoni, “Constructing the EU’s high-tech borders: Frontex and dual-use drones for border management”. Submission by Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Ibid. See https://dtm.iom.int/about. 20-14872