Fair digital asylum project granted in Team Science Call 2022

The Digital Society (‘DiSa’) programme and COMMIT/, a public-private ICT research community, have awarded grants to a Team Science research projects chaired by Dr Koen Leurs. The project 'Co-designing a fair digital asylum procedure' is awarded Euro 40,000 to be spent on the project and an additional Euro 5,000 towards dissemination plans. One of the applicants is Prof. Albert Salah, who's a member of the steering committee of Migration and Societal Change. We would like to congratulate everybody involved in this special project!

Co-designing a fair digital asylum procedure

Migration management is increasingly digitised and datafied. In the Netherlands, digital opportunities have been embraced for identity screening of applicants. However, the Athene pilot project – which aimed to automate digital assessment of copies of mobile devices to improve identification of asylum seekers, as well as to detect indicators of terrorism and human smuggling – has been put to a stop in November 2021.

To address the current void, the team will evaluate the Athene pilot from the ground up. It will empirically reconstruct understandings of fairness underpinning the institutions, the affected community of asylum seekers and digital technologies involved. Additionally, the team will co-design a new prototype of the digital Dutch asylum procedure, with a focus on identification. Through participatory design, the team develops a prototype which is fair, accountable and transparent (FAT) to both asylum seekers and institutions involved.

Consortium members

Dr Koen Leurs, Dr Rianne Dekker, Prof. Huub Dijstelbloem, Dr Djamila Schans, Prof. Albert Salah, Prof. Nishant Shah, Dr Stefania Milan, Kinan Alajak and Hemmo Bruinenberg

More information
Project website