New Border Force unit to deploy more surveillance tech in Channel

Existing surveillance capabilities

The surveillance capabilities already available to the UK’s border control ecosystem – including the Home Office, Border Force, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) and Joint Maritime Command, among others – to monitor the Channel, a stretch of water only 21 miles long, are extensive.

It includes various means of aerial surveillance, such as the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) and manned aircraft such as planes or helicopters, as well as radar, sensors and artificial intelligence (AI)-powered satellites.

Computer Weekly asked the Home Office about the impact the technologies being deployed by SBOC were expected to have on migrants’ human rights, including whether their use would force people into taking increasingly dangerous routes, but received no response by the time of publication.

In March 2022, the UK government came under fire from lawyers, human rights groups and migrant support organisations – including Molnar – for spending tens of millions of pounds on these border surveillance technologies, who told Computer Weekly they were being used to deter and help punish migrants crossing the English Channel.

Instead, they argued those same resources should be used to provide safe, legal routes into the UK, which currently do not exist despite government claims to the contrary.

Those Computer Weekly spoke with further noted that, despite the significant investment put into border surveillance technologies in recent years, the frequency of crossings has only increased, as have deaths.

In 2021, for example, more than 28,000 migrants crossed the English Channel from France to the UK on inflatable dinghies, kayaks or other small craft – a near-threefold increase on the 8,500 who crossed in 2020. In 2022, a total of 45,756 migrants crossed the Channel to the UK.

A government spokesperson said SBOC and the return of Channel primacy to the Home Office “is a significant landmark in our long-term plan to ensure the safety and sovereignty of our borders and our communities… our determination will not waiver until we stop the abuse of the asylum system and bring the smugglers responsible to justice”.

They added the number of people illegally entering the UK reached “an unsustainable and unacceptable” level in 2022.

A Court of Appeals judgment from December 2021, however, specifically ruled that “an asylum seeker who merely attempts to arrive at the frontiers of the UK in order to make a claim is not entering or attempting to enter the country unlawfully”.

The Nationality and Borders Act, which became law in April 2022, has since made it illegal for people to knowingly enter the UK without a visa or special permission, but asylum seekers are still unable to apply for protection outside of the UK, meaning that they can only lodge an asylum application after arriving.

The United Nations Refugee Agency said the act undermines the 1951 Refugee Convention and “will risk the lives and well-being of vulnerable people”.

In January 2023, the UK government proposed amending its upcoming Online Safety Bill to incorporate existing immigration offences into its list of priority offences – those which represent the most serious and prevalent illegal content or activity online, and which tech firms will be obliged to proactively prevent people from being exposed to – meaning technology companies could be forced to remove videos of people crossing the English Channel “which show that activity in a positive light”.

In proactively dealing with priority offences, firms must design features, functionalities and algorithms that prevent users from encountering them in the first place, and work to minimise the length of time the content is available on their services.

Then-digital minister Michelle Donelan – who is now in charge of the government’s newly established Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – added “the result of this amendment would therefore be that platforms would have to proactively remove that content” related to English Channel crossings.