The Centre for Fundamental Rights is delighted to welcome Dr. Matt Mahmoudi to deliver the opening keynote at the AFAR - Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum Seekers and Refugees - Final Conference in Berlin.
Dr. Mahmoudi will explore the technological dynamics of mobility management, highlighting how algorithms and digital infrastructures function as new borders that entangle race, capital, and colonial legacies.
The AFAR Conference is the culmination of the Algorithmic Fairness for Asylum Seekers and Refugees, a 4- year collaborative research project hosted at the Centre from 2021 to 2025. Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation through its “Challenges for Europe” funding programme, the project includes five other institutions across Europe, aiming to explore the fairness of automation in the highly contested field of migration and asylum governance.
The keynote will last for 60 minutes and will be followed by a reception.
Prior registration for this event is required. To attend the event, please register here.
Speakers
Matt Mahmoudi is an Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities at the University of Cambridge, and a Researcher/Advisor on Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights at Amnesty International. Matt’s research focus is on red-lining and resistance in digital cities and the “smart” reproduction of racial capitalism. At Amnesty, he has led research and advocacy work on AI-driven surveillance from the NYPD’s surveillance machine to Automated Apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory. He is a Research Associate with the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, an Affiliate Researcher with the DALOSS project at the University of Copenhagen, and an Advisory Council member at Foxglove. Matt was the inaugural Jo Cox PhD Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he spent his doctoral research investigating cities as new frontiers for migrant violence and digital border control. He is the author of Migrants in the Digital Periphery: New Urban Frontiers of Controls (University of California Press, 2025), and is a co-editor on Resisting Borders & Technologies of Violence (Haymarket, 2024) together with Mizue Aizeki and Coline Schupfer.
Welcome remarks
Violeta Moreno-Lax is Visiting Professor at the Hertie School, ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona and Full Professor of Law (on special leave) at Queen Mary University of London, where she serves as inaugural director of the (B)OrderS Centre for the Legal Study of Borders and Migration. She has published extensively in international and EU law at the intersection with border violence, global security, forced displacement, and human rights. As a world-leading expert in these fields, she regularly consults for UN agencies, the EU institutions, and other organisations she regularly consults for UN agencies, the EU institutions, and other organisations.
Chair
Cathryn Costello is a Visiting Professor at the Hertie School and Full Professor of Global Refugee and Migration Law at the Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin. She was formerly Professor of Fundamental Rights and Co-Director of the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School (2020 – 2023). She is a leading scholar of international and European refugee and migration law and also explores the relationship between migration and labour law in her work. Costello is the PI for the Volkswagen Foundation funded AFAR project, based at the Hertie Centre for Fundamental Rights. She holds a doctorate in law from the University of Oxford.
