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What’s at stake in the EU PNR debate?

12 April 2016

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My analysis & some arguments for why the proposal should be rejected by Edward Hasbrouck: "As we said in a submission cited with approval in a report last month by the UN Office Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights concerning the rights of migrants, "screening" and algorithmic travel control regimes are likely to result in systematic discrimination against asylum seekers and refugees: Their nationality or place of origin in a conflict zone may cause them to be deemed "risky" according to the profiling and "risk scoring" algorithms. There may be limited, inconsistent, or nonexistent records pertaining to migrants in irregular situations in the databases used for profiling and risk scoring, and screening algorithms may equate uncertainty with risk.

Controls on access to air travel throughout the EU on the basis of PNR profiling are thus likely to exclude many legitimate asylum seekers from travel by common carrier, forcing them to dangerous means of "irregular" and indirect transportation and compounding the EU migrant crisis. The PNR proposal is the European equivalent of Donald Trump's "proposal to build a wall on the USA-Mexico border, and would be just as disastrous."

See: What’s at stake in the EU PNR debate? (papersplease.org, link)

And see: Passenger Name Records, data mining & data protection: the need for strong safeguards (CoE, link) by Douwe Korff, Emeritus Professor of International Law, London Metropolitan University Associate, Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford with advice, comments and review by Marie Georges
Council of Europe Expert.

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