Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
Prefiguring AI Dystopias: Queering Facial Recognition and Refugee Legal Systems
Abstract
Can facial recognition technologies be used to determine who is queer? How might states use them to render a person’s sexual credibility or emotional authenticity in the context of asylum proceedings? Facial recognition is a ubiquitous technology of immigration control. Many states use it to verify a person’s identity. Given the political embrace of border protection and “artificial intelligence” across Europe, we ought to think carefully about what the consequences of border technologisation might mean for sexual and gender minorities navigating the asylum process. Those seeking to successfully claim asylum on the basis of their sexuality usually have to demonstrate (1) the truth of their sexual identity and (2) that their sexuality places them in position of having a well-founded fear of persecution. Adjudicators have to determine the credibility of people who seek asylum by verifying the emotional authenticity of their testimonies while also categorising those testimonies in terms of legal criteria relating to identity and persecution. The emergence of facial recognition technologies and other predictive AI tools raise epistemological, methodological, political, and ethical questions about the ways in which these technologies might be used for refugee adjudication, especially in overburdened asylum systems that lack appropriate resources. Drawing on recent attempts to develop facial recognition tools to predict sexual orientation, this talk offers a dystopic imagining of the potential impacts of AI in the context of asylum decision-making in the UK with a particular focus on how they might reproduce structural injustices and impair rights to privacy, dignity, and equality.
PhDs, Post-Docs, professors as well as interested external auditors, are cordially invited to participate in and contribute to our seminar series titled: “Human Rights: Insights into Today’s Challenges” hosted by the Doctoral School of Law. The aim of the seminar is to have an in depth discussion on a different human rights issue in each seminar. Presentations of 15 to 20 minutes (or up to 30 minutes if we have two or more speakers) will be followed by an open group discussion.
About the speaker
Dr Senthorun (Sen) Raj is a Reader of Human Rights Law at Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University. Sen’s academic and advocacy work take an intersectional approach to examining the relationship between emotion, culture, race, gender, sexuality, and law across different jurisdictions. He is the author of Feeling Queer Jurisprudence: Injury, Intimacy, Identity (Routledge, 2020), and co-editor of The Queer Outside in Law: Recognising LGBTIQ People in the United Kingdom (Palgrave, 2020) and Queer Judgments (Counterpress, 2025). He currently serves on the editorial board of Feminist Legal Studies and Palgrave’s Socio-Legal Studies Book Series. Sen is also the former chair of Amnesty International UK. His most recent book, The Emotions of LGBT Rights and Reforms: Repairing Law(Edinburgh University Press, 2025), explores how emotions structure socio-legal conflicts relating to LGBT people in Australia, the United Kingdom, and United States with a focus on religious exemptions to equality laws, legal gender recognition, bans on conversion practices, and sex education in schools.
Language
English
This is a free event. Registration is mandatory.