Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship: Identifying Technical Standards for Introducer-Based Remote Onboarding in Global Contexts of Statelessness, Nomadism, Displacement, and Refuge

Abstract

All throughout the so-called “Global South”, hundreds of millions of individuals from entire communities in the rural, poorer, or most peripheral areas are not officially recorded by the States they are citizens of or they habitually reside in. This is why several of such States are resorting to extensive and purportedly “universal” digital remote onboarding programs, pioneered by India’s Aadhaar, whereby individuals are centrally recorded onto a public database with their identity (and possibly citizenship) confirmed. Whenever paper documents are obsolete, inaccurate, deteriorated, or inexistent, individuals may have their identity confirmed through an “introducer”, who mediates between marginalised communities and central authorities and is entrusted by both with this delicate task. Introducers, however, cannot by themselves grant someone the status as “citizen”: they may at best confirm his or her existence and identity. These onboarding programs are enabled by wide-covering sets of technical standards, ranging from data protection and cybersecurity to interoperability, safety, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Meanwhile, similar technologies, relying on analogous standards, and fundamentally aimed at a similar purpose (that is, registering all those who fall within the prescriptive jurisdiction of a State), are deployed by border officials in the context of migration management – especially in “developed” countries. The “unofficial” and “outside-the-scope-of-the-law” components of said migratory patterns are growing exponentially due to combined effects of climate, insecurity, and geopolitical factors, increasingly originating “borderline” situations whereby identity and citizenship are challenged and contested: statelessness, refuge, nomadism (both traditional and “digital”), and internal displacement. Strikingly enough, discussions around what technical standards to adopt, and who should select them, as well as on what the role of “introducers” could be, towards the digital onboarding of individuals experiencing “borderline” configurations of citizenship are entirely neglected in socio-legal and security scholarship alike. Complemented with concrete policy proposals, the present work accepts the ambition to start bridging this gap.