UNHCR and biometrics: refugees' rights in a legal no-man's land?

In the last few decades, governments have increasingly sought to relocate away from their territorial limits border practices that serve to identify, filter, and, if necessary, prevent foreigners’ crossings into their national space. This shift is facilitated by digital innovations that offer new opportunities for making migrants legible from afar, miles away from the border. Yet the turn to emerging technologies is not the preserve of governments. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has been using digital technologies, including biometrics data, for several decades. For UNHCR these are becoming an essential tool in accounting for the populations under its protection. This chapter explores this development. The first part surveys the deterritorialization of border controls in state practice with a focus on the enabling role of biometrics and digitization in that process. Then, it demonstrates how the use of biometrics by UNHCR maps onto these states’ practices. The second part considers the consequences of UNHCR’s practices surrounding the biometric registration of refugees, the risks posed by the collection of biometric data in the refugee context, and how the institutional and structural conditions in which UNHCR operates, especially with regard to consent, accountability mechanisms, and legal safeguards, may undermine refugees’ control over their data.