Statewatch

"“As well as having to hand over all this information, travellers will have to deal with longer waiting times at borders and will face the risk of being flagged as a “risk” by an algorithm. EU officials are currently devising new ‘screening rules’ that will be used to decide who is a security, immigration or health risk,” Statewatch’s Chris Jones told i.

“These rules will reinforce the existing racist and discriminatory profiling that takes place at borders. It is urgent that people know their rights so that they can challenge unjust decisions or treatment,” he added.

“While travellers will face inconvenience, invasive data-gathering and profiling, the real beneficiaries of these new systems are police and border forces, alongside the corporations developing and maintaining the databases, who are receiving hundreds of millions of Euros in public money,” Mr Jones said.

The UK is developing its own system, similar to the Etias. With all the confusion surrounding the EU’s initiative, Mr Jones suggests the UK “would be wise to follow a different path”."

Full story here.

See also: Britons without new €7 EU visa face being turned away at airport in 2025

"L’Europe forteresse cherche à faire enfler son arsenal répressif contre les exilés et ceux qui les aident. C’est ce que l’ONG Statewatch a pointé au milieu de l’été, révélant l’existence d’un projet européen de modification de la directive sur l’aide à l’immigration illégale de 2002."

Full story here, based on our article here.

"Esas controvertidas exenciones casan con la estrategia de defensa de la UE. Entre 2007 y 2022, Bruselas destinó 341 millones de euros a investigar las tecnologías de IA en las fronteras, según un informe de Statewatch, desde robots autónomos de control migratorio a enjambres de drones de videovigilancia. Esos fondos han financiado el despliegue de sistemas biométricos en España o el desarrollo de un sistema de predicción algorítmica de flujos migratorios desarrollado en Catalunya. "Europa se está fortificando de todas las formas posibles y la ley de la IA es clave para ir a más (...), una capa extra de la discriminación y violación flagrante de derechos que ya se da en la frontera", valora Judith Membrives, técnica de digitalización y experta en IA en Lafede.cat."

Full story here, citing our report: A clear and present danger: Missing safeguards on migration and asylum in the EU’s AI Act

"In March, the Statewatch NGO published an investigation that found multiple Israeli drone companies had received money from EU framework programmes, and that this drone technology was now potentially being used in the war in Gaza.

Asked about the investigation, a Commission spokesperson pointed out that “results of R&D projects may develop – either immediately or with adaptation – technologies with a dual-use potential, even if these R&D projects were originally intended for purely civil applications. This transition could happen beyond the lifetime of the R&D project itself.”"

"A Swedish letter, known in EU jargon as a "non-paper", was distributed to the other 26 governments in the Council in June.

In the five-page document, published by Statewatch, a civil liberties NGO, Sweden argues for the need for a "fundamental change of perspective" in the fight against organised crime and terrorism.

The call comes after more than a year of Swedish work in the EU to facilitate access to encrypted data traffic and encrypted content on computers and phones."

Full story here and our coverage here and here.

"I rimpatri forzati possono svolgersi anche su voli di linea, imbarcando la persona prima degli altri passeggeri e isolandola nei posti in fondo. Ma c’è sempre il rischio che faccia resistenza, cercando di attirare l’attenzione degli altri passeggeri, e che il comandante finisca per farla sbarcare se la situazione a bordo diventa ingestibile. Tutto questo sui charter non succede. “Il vantaggio dei rimpatri via charter è che sono più facili da tenere sotto controllo”, riassume Yasha Maccanico, ricercatore dell’organizzazione Statewatch, che segue da vicino il tema dei rimpatri a livello europeo."

Full story here.

Staff

To contact individual staff members, replace [at] with @.

Tony Bunyan (Director Emeritus)

Tony is an investigative journalist and writer specialising in justice and home affairs, civil liberties, EU state-building and freedom of information. He was Director of Statewatch 1990-2010 and edited Statewatch News (1999-2010). He is the author of The Political Police in Britain (1977), Secrecy and Openness in the European Union (1999) and The Shape of Things to Come (2009) and edited The War on Freedom and Democracy (2005). He is a Member of the Council of the Institute of Race Relations and a Lifetime Member of the National Union of Journalists  The position of Director Emeritus in Statewatch is a life-time appointment - Tony continues to be a member of the Statewatch team.

• Email: tony [at] statewatch.org

Chris Jones (Executive Director)

Chris has been working for Statewatch since 2010 and in September 2020 was appointed as Executive Director. He specialises in issues relating to policing, migration, privacy and data protection and security technologies.

• Email: chris [at] statewatch.org
• @earsinfingers

Romain Lanneau (Consultant Researcher)

Romain Lanneau is a legal researcher based in Amsterdam, publishing on the topics of migration, asylum, and the use of new technologies for public policies. In 2021, he was selected as a Bucerius Start Up PhD Fellow for a one-year project on the theme of 'Beyond Borders'. He is a recent graduate of a research LLM on International Migration and Refugee Law from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. In the past, he worked for several NGOs, including the largest research network on migration and refugee law in Europe, the Odysseus Academic Network.

• Email: romain [at] statewatch.org
• @romainlanneau

Yasha Maccanico (Researcher)

Yasha has worked for Statewatch since 1998, providing news coverage, analysis and translations to link EU policies to events on the ground in the justice and home affairs field in several member states (UK, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and Portugal). He has extensive public speaking experience in civil society and academic contexts and in 2019 completed a PhD at the University of Bristol in Policy Studies on the topic of 'European Immigration Policies as a Problem: State Power and Authoritarianism'.

• Email: yasha [at] statewatch.org
• @yashamac1

Rahmat Tavakkoli (Finance & Administration Worker)

Rahmat joined Statewatch in September 2021 to take care of our financial and administrative procedures, ensure compliance with regulatory requirements and contribute to the smooth running of the office and the organization.

• Email admin [at] statewatch.org

Trustees

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche

Marie-Laure Basilien-Gainche is Professor of Law at the University Jean Moulin Lyon 3, honorarium member of the Institut Universitaire de France, and fellow of the Institut Convergence Migrations. Her researches focus on the exigencies of the rule of law and their limitations in cases of exceptions: the situations of serious crises which allow the concentration of powers and restriction of rights (e.g. the use of the state of emergency), and the areas of legal confinement which are conducive to abuses of power and rights infringements (e.g. camps and centres where migrants and refugees are detained). She is member of the editorial board of various reviews and is involved in numerous academics networks regarding human rights law. You can find more information about her activities and publications on her personal webpage.

Laure Baudrihaye-Gérard

Laure is a lawyer based in Brussels, where she works on EU and Belgian criminal justice policy. She qualified as a solicitor in London, specialised in EU law and worked in private practice in both London and Brussels before studying criminology. After participating in several academic research projects, Laure joined Fair Trials, a criminal justice watchdog, in 2018. As Legal Director for Europe, she led on EU advocacy, strategic litigation in European courts and the coordination of a European-wide network of criminal defence lawyers, civil society and academic organisations. She has also been working as a prison monitor since 2019 in a large pre-trial detention prison in Brussels, and since 2020 heads up the appeals committee that adjudicates on complaints from detained people against the prison administration.

Jonathan Bloch

Jonathan Bloch studied law at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics. He was politically involved in South Africa in the worker and student movement and remains active in human rights circles in the UK. From 2002 until 2014 he chaired the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, one of the largest scholarship awarding organisations in South Africa. He was a councillor in the London Borough of Haringey 2002-14. He has co-authored several books on intelligence. He owns and runs a worldwide financial information business across four continents.

Victoria Canning

Victoria Canning is senior lecturer in Criminology at the University of Bristol. She has spent over a decade working on the rights of women seeking asylum, specifically on support for survivors of sexual violence and torture with NGOs and migrant rights organisations. She recently completed an ESRC Research Leaders Fellowship focussing on harmful practice in asylum systems in Britain, Denmark and Sweden, and the gendered implications thereof. Vicky has experience researching in immigration detention in Denmark and Sweden, as well as Denmark’s main deportation centre. She is currently embarking on a study of torture case file datasets with the Danish Institute Against Torture which aims to create a basis from which to better identify and thus respond to sexual torture and sexualised torturous violence with refugee survivors of torture more broadly.

Nadine Finch

Nadine was a member of the Statewatch contributors group for a number of years and also previously a trustee. She was a human rights barrister between 1992 and 2015 and an Upper Tribunal Judge from 2015 to 2020. She is now an Honorary Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Bristol and an Associate at Child Circle, a children's rights NGO based in Brussels.

Lilana Keith

Lilana Keith is PICUM’s Senior Advocacy Officer on Labour Rights and Labour migration. PICUM - the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants, is a network of more than 165 organisations in 35 countries, mostly in Europe, working for human rights and social justice for undocumented migrants.

Lilana joined PICUM in 2011 and has had various roles, including leading PICUM’s work to advance the rights and inclusion of undocumented children, young people and families for many years. She has been involved in work to advance migrants’ rights since 2009, including through community development and funding. She has an academic background in international and European migration law and policy and anthropology.