New Technologies in International Law / Tymofeyeva, Crhák et al.

to control or set entry requirements in a country or group of countries, like the EU, have a geographical dimension. While States and the international community have not remained idle to the thousands of migrants that perish each year, their response has been rather tailored to averting the ‘threat’ posed by irregular migration to their territoriality sovereignty. 885 In addressing this phenomenon, contemporary manifestations of State power have been increasingly witnessed through the use and deployment of technology in external border management. Such technological border control practices are best characterized by the risk logic which primarily deals with the anticipation and active prevention of undesirable events rather than with the existence of existential threats. 886 By way of illustration, precaution oriented strategies of border surveillance including aerial and maritime drones have been utilized as pre-frontier detection and monitoring mechanisms, enhancing in this way a State’s capacity to control migrant boats. Advanced technologies such as sea-bed and ground sensors, satellite and aerial video surveillance, thermal imaging cameras, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), and even experimental robotic technology are deployed to monitor and control movement before individuals reach a country’s physical borders. 887 European States have enormously invested and employed technologies of control and surveillance that have as the primary goal to tame migration in the Mediterranean, thereby treating the sea as a border to halt migration flows at all costs. 888 In this way, technologies are not merely the result of a risk-based approach to migration, but they also enable it serving both as a factor and an outcome of treating cross-border mobility as a security concern. 889 This can be particularly traced first by the establishment of the European Border Surveillance System (EUROSUR) in 2013, a program that is operated by the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) that uses big data technologies (including satellite imagery and ship recording services) ‘to predict, control and monitor 885 Papastavridis E, ‘Rescuing Migrants at Sea and the Law of International Responsibility’ in Gammeltoft Hansen T and Vedsted-Hansen J (eds), Human Rights and the Dark Side of Globalisation: Transnational Law Enforcement and Migration Control (T&F, 2016), p. 161. 886 Niemann A and Schmidthäussler N, ‘The Logic of EU Policy-Making on (Irregular) Migration: Securitisation or Risk’ ( Mainz Papers on International and European Politics , 2012) , p. 13. 887 Kapogianni V, ‘The Reverberations of the Rise of Fencing Border Regimes: Pushbacks, Detention and Surveillance Technologies’ ( International Law Blog , 21 November 2022) . Also, other AI technologies deployed at external borders include integrated analysis of various data streams including Automatic Identification Systems (AIS), coastal and vessel-mounted sensors, and contextual information concerning the weather, commercial activities, environmental conditions, military exercises and maritime incidents, see also European Border and Coast Guard Agency, ‘Artificial Intelligence-Based Capabilities for the European Border and Coast Guard Final Report’ ( Frontex , 2021) . 888 Foucault M, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books, 1975), p. 318. 889 Rijpma J, ‘Brave New Borders: The EU’s Use of New Technologies for the Management of Migration and Asylum’ in Cremona (ed), New Technologies and EU Law (OUP, 2017), p. 210.

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