by Kaamil Ahmed and Lorenzo Tondo
We map out the rising number of high-tech surveillance and deterrent systems facing asylum seekers along EU borders
from military-grade drones to sensor systems and experimental
technology, the EU and its members have spent hundreds of millions of euros
over the past decade on technologies to track down and keep at bay the refugees
on its borders.
Poland’s border with Belarus
is becoming the latest frontline for this technology, with the country
approving last month a €350m (£300m) wall with advanced cameras
and motion sensors.
The Guardian has mapped out the result of the EU’s investment: a digital wall on the harsh sea, forest and mountain frontiers, and a technological playground for military and tech companies repurposing products for new markets.
The EU is central to the push
towards using technology on its borders, whether it has been bought by the EU’s
border force, Frontex, or financed for member states through EU sources, such
as its internal security fund or Horizon 2020, a project to drive innovation.
“In effect, none of this stops
people from crossing; having drones or helicopters doesn’t stop people from
crossing, you just see people taking more risky ways,” says Jack Sapoch,
formerly with Border Violence Monitoring Network. “This is a history that’s so
long, as security increases on one section of the border, movement continues in
another section.”
Petra Molnar, who runs the
migration and technology monitor at Refugee Law Lab, says the EU’s reliance on
these companies to develop “hare-brained ideas” into tech for use on its
borders is inappropriate.
“They rely on the private
sector to create these toys for them. But there’s very little regulation,” she
says. “Some sort of tech bro is having a field day with this.”
“For me, what’s really sad is
that it’s almost a done deal that all this money is being spent on camps,
enclosures, surveillance, drones.”
Air Surveillance
Refugees and migrants trying
to enter the EU by land or sea are watched from the air. Border officers use
drones and helicopters in the Balkans, while Greece has airships on its border
with Turkey. The most expensive tool is the long-endurance Heron drone
operating over the Mediterranean.
Frontex awarded a €100m (£91m) contract last year for the Heron
and Hermes drones made by two Israeli arms companies, both of which had been
used by the Israeli military in the Gaza Strip. Capable of flying for more than
30 hours and at heights of 10,000 metres (30,000 feet), the drones beam almost
real-time feeds back to Frontex’s HQ in Warsaw.
Missions mostly start from Malta, focusing on the Libyan search and rescue zone – where the Libyan coastguard will perform “pull backs” when informed by EU forces of boats trying to cross the Mediterranean.
German MEP Özlem Demirel is
campaigning against the EU’s use of drones and links to arms companies, which
she says has turned migration into a security issue.
“The arms industries are
saying: ‘This is a security problem, so buy my weapons, buy my drones, buy my
surveillance system,’” says Demirel.
“The EU is always talking
about values like human rights, [speaking out] against violations but …
week-by-week we see more people dying and we have to question if the EU is
breaking its values,” she says.
Sensors and cameras
EU air assets are accompanied
on the ground by sensors and specialised cameras that border authorities
throughout Europe use to spot movement and
find people in hiding. They include mobile radars and thermal cameras mounted
on vehicles, as well as heartbeat detectors and CO2 monitors used to detect
signs of people concealed inside vehicles.
Greece deploys thermal cameras
and sensors along its land border with Turkey, monitoring the feeds from
operations centres, such as in Nea Vyssa, near the meeting of the Greek, Turkish
and Bulgarian borders. Along the same stretch, in June, Greece deployed a
vehicle-mounted sound cannon that blasts “deafening”
bursts of up to 162 decibels to force people to turn back.
Poland is hoping to emulate Greece in response to the crisis on its border with Belarus. In October, its parliament approved a €350m wall that will stretch along half the border and reach up to 5.5 metres (18 feet), equipped with motion detectors and thermal cameras.
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A control room with 11 monitors and 30 cameras for surveillance along the
Evros River in Nea Vyssa, Greece. Photograph:
Byron Smith/Getty Images |
Surveillance centres
In September, Greece opened a refugee camp on the island of Samos that has been described as prison-like. The €38m (£32m) facility for 3,000 asylum seekers has military-grade fencing and CCTV to track people’s movements. Access is controlled by fingerprint, turnstiles and X-rays. A private security company and 50 uniformed officers monitor the camp. It is the first of five that Greece has planned; two more opened in November.
At the same time, Greece
opened a new surveillance centre on Samos, capable of viewing video
feeds from the country’s 35 refugee camps from a wall of monitors. Greece says
the “smart” software helps to alert camps of emergencies.
Artificial intelligence
The EU spent €4.5m (£3.8m) on
a three-year trial of artificial intelligence-powered lie detectors in Greece, Hungary and Latvia. A machine scans refugees and
migrants’ facial expressions as they answer questions it poses, deciding
whether they have lied and passing the information on to a border officer.
The last trial finished in
late 2019 and was hailed as a success by the EU but academics have called it pseudoscience, arguing that the
“micro-expressions” the software analyses cannot be reliably used to judge
whether someone is lying. The software is the subject of a court case taken by MEP Patrick
Breyer to the European court of justice in Luxembourg, arguing that there
should be more public scrutiny of such technology. A decision is expected on
15 December.
6/12/2021
