Open Rights Group (ORG) is the UK’s leading digital rights organisation, working to protect privacy, free expression, and digital justice. ORG’s Migrants’ Digital Justice programme focuses on exposing and challenging how technology and data systems impact migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers.

Background

Governments are increasingly using AI to both externalise and internalise their borders to extend its border control beyond their territorial limits while creating a digital hostile environment domestically under the disguise of so-called ‘smart borders.’ This often deepens inequality and injustice, driven by racialised, xenophobic, and ethnonationalist politics that seek to exclude certain groups on discriminatory grounds.

ORG is seeking a consultant policy expert to help produce and define a clear, evidence-based position for human rights NGOs and civil society organisations on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the immigration and asylum system, and its implications for migrants’, refugees’, and asylum seekers’ data and rights in the UK.

The consultant will help:

• Analyse the Home Office’s current, future and planned use of AI tools in immigration and asylum processes.

• Map key human rights, data protection, and equality risks.

• Draft a position paper and policy recommendations for ORG and partner organisations.

Aim of the Work

• To clarify and document how AI is currently being used or proposed within UK immigration control, border management, and asylum decision-making.

• Evaluate legal and ethical implications for privacy, fairness, discrimination, and accountability.

• How does the use of AI in the immigration system contribute to the digital hostile environment policy?

• To develop a shared narrative and advocacy framework for civil society and migrant organisations to respond collectively to AI use in migration systems.

Key themes to explore

1. Transparency and accountability: in algorithmic decision-making (risk scoring, data matching, automated triage).

2. Human rights and equality impacts include bias, discrimination, and access to remedy.

3. Data flows and governance: who can access migrants’ data, and under what safeguards.

4. AI and surveillance technologies include predictive analytics, biometric analysis, or automated risk assessment.

5. International data sharing and potential harm to individuals seeking protection.

6. Legal frameworks: compliance with the UK GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018, Human Rights Act, Refugee Convention obligations, and ECHR.

7. Ethical principles: necessity, proportionality, transparency, and informed consent.

Protections and principles to be defined

The consultant will identify and articulate protections needed to ensure AI use respects migrants’ rights, such as:

• The right to human review.

• Data minimisation and strict limits on secondary uses or sharing with law enforcement.

• A firewall between essential public services and immigration enforcement.

• Prohibition of automated discrimination or profiling based on nationality, race, or migration status.

• The right to explanation, access, and correction in all AI-assisted processes.

• Ensuring transparency and accountability mechanisms within the Home Office’s digital systems.

Deliverables

A written policy paper (approx. 10–15 pages).

Timeline and Application

Start: As soon as possible.

Please send a 1–2 page proposal, CV, to recruitment@openrightsgroup.org, with the subject line: Consultancy – AI and Immigration System.

Deadline: 9 November 2025