Humanitarian and Human Rights Surveillance: The Challenge to Border Surveillance and Invisibility?

The European border regime has traditionally rested on the hidden surveillance activities of border authorities, which have contributed to human rights violations (including “push-back” and “left-to-die” practices) and a rising migrant death toll. Recently a number of humanitarian and activist organizations, including Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS), Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed, have organized to aid migrants in distress at sea using surveillance technologies, ranging from drones to GPS. By doing so, they presented a challenge to the European border surveillance regime. In dialogue with the concept of countersurveillance, this paper introduces the concepts of humanitarian surveillance and human rights surveillance and deploys them to examine and categorize the activities of MOAS, MSF, Sea-Watch, and WatchTheMed. Humanitarian surveillance narrowly focuses on aiding victims of surveillance without problematizing the logic and hierarchies of surveillance, while human rights surveillance operates as a form of countersurveillance; it aims to protect and advance the human rights of victims of surveillance and expose human rights violations committed by authorities through opposing the hierarchies of surveillance. The paper shows how civilian groups incorporate elements of humanitarian and human rights surveillance in their activities at varying levels and discusses the extent to which they challenge the European border surveillance regime.