Paper short abstract:

Despite technological advancements in monitoring Europe's maritime borders, migrant deaths and rights denial persist. We argue that the state use of AI border technology exploits "grey areas" and contributes to the avoidance of legal accountability

Paper long abstract:

Although the Mediterranean Sea is considered one of the most technologically monitored regions in the world, at least 2500 migrants died trying to cross it in 2023 alone. Other migrants who arrived by boat were prevented from applying for asylum in the European Union. Despite the increasing technological advances in border control through autonomous technologies and drones and the visibility they bring, they have not prevented these incidents of death and refoulement. We suspect that the potential of autonomous technologies for state actors to take responsibility for maritime migration is often not utilised to provide access to rights for people on the move. Instead, it seems to amount to evading legal responsibility for refugees (Bužinkić & Avon, 2020). We are particularly interested in how state actors construct and exploit legal "grey areas" through AI border technologies and drones at the southern European maritime borders. To investigate this, we draw on financial data, policy documents and existing literature on the technological capabilities of border actors (national coast guards and Frontex) at Europe's maritime borders. We hypothesise that the exploitation of such grey areas is possible due to 1) transnational dependencies and economic interests in the high-tech sector, 2) a legal landscape that is slowly evolving in response to new policy issues raised by AI, and 3) specific, sometimes unintended, forms of knowledge production through AI and drones. We illustrate these points with selected case studies on the southern European maritime borders.