Smart Camps and Digital Border Governance in the Eastern Mediterranean

📄 The EU's newest reception centres on Lesvos and Samos are fitted with biometric gates, AI surveillance, and real-time monitoring. Behind that infrastructure: overcrowded facilities, daily water shortages, and people who can't eat when the system goes down.

"Smart Camps and Digital Border Governance in the Eastern Mediterranean" is HDRI's new Migration & Security research paper, authored by Soumit Farhan, Georgios Kapsalis, and Arantza Renteria Vizcarra, and edited by Guglielmo Maria Barbetta.

The paper examines the Closed Controlled Access Centres (CCACs) on Lesvos and Samos, two islands where the EU has invested heavily in digital control, while residents go without clean water, adequate healthcare, or a reliable meal.

Three findings stand out:

🔹 Mobility and access to services are mediated through biometric systems.

When they fail, people lose access to food.

🔹 Surveillance programmes like Centaur and Hyperion enable continuous, automated monitoring of residents' movements.

🔹 Overcrowding, water shortages, and healthcare gaps persist alongside the most advanced digital camp infrastructure in Europe.

This paper is part of a wider effort to document how digital governance is reshaping migration across Europe, and what it costs in human terms. As the EU Migration Pact rolls out, these questions will only become more urgent.

➡️ Interested in our evidence-based research? Read the full paper and stay tuned for upcoming research!

#Migration #HumanRights #Refugees