RightsCon Tunis 2019

This workshop convenes a critical session surrounding the development, use, and experience of emerging ICTs for ‘integration’ amongst refugees, asylum seekers, and vulnerable migrant populations at destinations. With smartphones to hand, many refugees today document their traversals and communicate with family scattered across the globe, creating and leaving data trails. Once they reach an intermediary or final destination, biometric data is recorded in order to process visas or asylum documents, even to grant access to benefits schemes. As they enter new cultural and geographical contexts, refugees are subject to more data processing - as job seekers and housing applicants, or as users of civic tech for integration The workshop invites participants at RightsCon, especially those potentially affected by these technologies, to take part in producing a set of easily accessible guidelines to ensure that the development of refugee centred technologies take a rights-based approach. It brings together speakers (and break out group facilitators) from the Centre of Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, the Localization Lab, UNHCR, and the International Rescue Committee, who are engaged with either the development or critical evaluation of technologies used in migration contexts.