Publications
Featured Publications
Petra Molnar, The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (New Press, 2024).
Based on years of researching borderlands across the world, lawyer and anthropologist Petra Molnar’s The Walls Have Eyes is a truly global story—a dystopian vision turned reality, where your body is your passport and matters of life and death are determined by algorithm. Examining how technology is being deployed by governments on the world’s most vulnerable with little regulation, Molnar also shows us how borders are now big business, with defense contractors and tech start-ups alike scrambling to capture this highly profitable market.
The article uses machine learning processes to extract data from thousands of online Federal Court (Canada) dockets to explore patterns in stay of removal decisions. The article argues that outcomes in stays of removal appear to hinge in part on the luck of the draw, on which judge is assigned to hear the case. The article demonstrates that technologies that are increasingly used to enhance the power of the state at the expense of marginalized migrants can instead be used to scrutinize legal decision-making in the immigration law field, hopefully in ways that enhance the rights of migrants.
This article explores the experiences of transgender refugee claimants in Canada’s refugee status determination system by using mixed methods: quantitative analysis of data obtained from the Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB), reviews of published and unpublished decisions, country condition documentation packages and IRB guidelines, as well as interviews with refugee lawyers. The articles argues that while transgender refugee claims appear to be largely successful in recent years, longstanding patterns of exclusion and erasure as policy nevertheless lead many transgender claimants to experience the refugee determination process as traumatic and transphobic, resulting in unaccounted-for complications and challenges to practice.
List of Publications
Books
Journal Articles
- S. Wallace, B. Perryman, G. Lukács & S. Rehaag, “‘The Biggest Problem With You..’: Racial profiling and Canada’s program of extra-territorial migrant interdiction” (forthcoming) Osgoode Hall Law Journal.
- A. Verman & S. Rehaag, “Transgender Erasure: Barriers facing transgender refugees in Canada” (forthcoming) McGill Law Journal.
- S. Rehaag, “Claim Types in Canada’s Refugee Determination System: An Empirical Snapshot (2013-2021)” (2024) 40: 1 Refuge 1.
- S. Rehaag, “Luck of the Draw III: Using AI to Extract Data About Decision-Making in Federal Court Stays of Removal” (2024) 49:2 Queen’s Law Journal 73.
- R. Jones, A. Kocher, F. Sultana, D. Smiles, K. McSweeney & P. Molnar, “Interventions on public geographies” (2024) 111 Political Geography.
- E. Mercier & S. Rehaag, “Canadian ‘Dreamers’: Access to Postsecondary Education” (2023) 60 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 699.
- P. Molnar, “Digital border technologies, techno-racism and logics of exclusion” (2023) 61:5 International Migration 307.
- J. Khan & S. Rehaag, “Promoting Privacy, Fairness and the Open Court Principle in Immigration and Refugee Proceedings” (2023) 54:2 Ottawa Law Review 357.
- S. Rehaag & P.A. Thériault, “Judgments v Reasons in Federal Court Refugee Claim Judicial Reviews: A Bad Precedent?” (2022) 45:1 Dalhousie Law Journal 185.
- P. Molnar, “Technological Testing Grounds and Surveillance Sandboxes: Migration and Border Technology at the Frontiers” (2021) 45:2 Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 109.
- E. Mercier & S. Rehaag, “The right to seek asylum in Canada (during a global pandemic)” (2020) 57 Osgoode Hall Law Journal 705.
- S. Rehaag & H.E. Cameron, “Experimenting with Credibility in Refugee Adjudication: Gaydar” (2020) 9 Canadian Journal of Human Rights 1.
- S. Rehaag, J. Song & A. Toope, “Never letting a good crisis go to waste: Canadian interdiction of asylum seekers” (2020) 2 Frontiers in Human Dynamics 588961.
Book Chapters
- P. Molnar, “AI in border control and migration: techno-racism and exclusion at digital borders” in R. Paul, E. Carmel, J. Cobbe, eds, Handbook on Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence (Edward Elgar: 2024) 307.
- P. Molnar, “Territorial and Digital Borders and Migrant Vulnerability Under a Pandemic Crisis” in A. Triandafyllidou, ed, Migration and Pandemics: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception (Toronto: Springer, 2022) 45.
- P. Molnar, “Robots and refugees: the human rights impacts of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making in migration” in M. McAuliffe, ed, Research Handbook on International Migration and Digital Technology (Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021) 134.
- P. Molnar, “Surveillance sovereignty: Migration management technologies and the politics of privatization” in G. Hudson and I. Atak, eds, Migration, Security, and Resistance: Global and Local Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2021).
- P. Molnar, “Architectures of Trauma: Forced Shelter and Immigration Detention” in T. Scott-Smith and M.E. Breeze, eds, Structure of Protection?: Rethinking Refugee Shelter (New York: Berghahn Books, 2020) 83.
Conference Proceedings
Reports
- L. McGregor & P. Molnar, “Digital Border Governance: A human rights based approach” (2024) University of Essex and OHCHR.
- C.D. Smith, S. Rehaag & T.C.W. Farrow, “Access to Justice for Refugees: How Legal Aid and Quality of Counsel Impact Fairness and Efficiency in Canada’s Asylum System” (2021) Toronto: Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration, Centre for Refugee Studies, Canadian Forum on Civil Justice.
- S. Wallace, S. Rehaag, & B.L. Berger, “Immigration Detention meets Evidence Law: a discussion paper” (2021) Fact-Finding in Immigration Detention reviews: Evidence Law Meets Administrative Law Workshop, 30 September & 1 October, 2021.
- P. Molnar, “Technological Testing Grounds: Migration Management Experiments and Reflections from the Ground Up” (2020) European Digital Rights and Refugee Law Lab.
Media Articles
- P. Molnar, “Deadly border technologies are increasingly employed to violently deter migration” in The Conversation (16 June 2024).
- P. Molnar, “The Deadly Digital Frontiers at the Border” in Time (21 May 2024).
- Y. Su, C. Robinson & S. Rehaag, “Setting the record straight on refugee claims by international students” in The Conversation (5 May 2024).
- P. Molnar, “‘Nothing about us without us’: People on the move interrogate border tech with the Migration and Technology Monitor” in Open Global Rights (5 April 2024).
- P. Molnar, “The Grim High-Tech Dystopia on the US-Mexico Border” in Jacobin (28 March 2024).
- P. Molnar, “The New Gospel of Violence: Surveillance Meets Border Violence in Palestine” in The Border Chronicle (20 December 2023).
- P. Molnar, “EU’s AI Act Falls Short on Protecting Rights at Borders” in Just Security (20 December 2023).
- S. Rehaag, “Borders and AI: Human rights-enhancing legal technologies” in Open Global Rights (28 May 2023).
- J. Liew, P. Molnar & J. Young, “The new US-Canada border deal is inhumane – and deadly” in Al Jazeera (19 April 2023).
- A. Smith, C. Rodelli, S. Chander & P. Molnar, Racist algorithms and AI can’t determine EU migration policy” in EU Observer (9 February 2023).
- P. Molnar & S. Chander, “The AI Act: EU’s chance to regulate harmful border technologies” in Thomson Reuters Foundation News (17 May 2022).
- P. Molnar, “Surveillance is at the heart of the EU’s migration control agenda” in Euractiv (28 September 2021).
- J. Liew & P. Molnar, “Clear safeguards needed around technology planned for border checkpoints” (7 May 2021).
- P. Molnar & K.J. Pinto, “Dispatch from a refugee camp during the COVID-19 pandemic” in The Province (18 October 2020).
- S. Rehaag, “Canadian court correctly finds the U.S. is unsafe for refugees” in The Conversation (24 July 2020).
- S. Rehaag, “Whose travel is ‘essential’ during coronavirus: Hockey players or asylum-seekers?” in The Conversation (17 June 2020).