Can biometric ‘humanitarian’ passports protect dissidents from authoritarian regimes?

Authoritarian regimes have been leveraging their power over passports to control dissidents for decades: Canceling a passport or revoking citizenship can make a political refugee stateless, putting them at risk of deportation or impending their activism overseas. One way to prevent authoritarian states from abusing their power over passports would be issuing biometrically-based “humanitarian” digital passports that are internationally recognized, according to policy experts.

Humanitarian passports could be backed by international organizations or a coalition of liberal democracies, allowing dissidents and activists to travel, Russian oppositionist Alena Popova and Evan A. Feigenbaum from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argue for Foreign Policy.

“Biometric technology — already used for identification purposes — could also be used to enable travel, entry, and exit into democratic countries,” they write. “This would prevent dictatorships from abusing their passport power extraterritorially to silence dissent.”

International governments already have options such as passport waivers to accommodate individuals fleeing from prosecution. But these solutions are rarely used and do not solve the issue for travelers who need to travel more than once.

The infrastructure that could enable governments to record travelers just through biometrics is already being put into place through projects such as the EU’s Entry-Exist System (EES) and the U.S. Global Entry scheme. United Nations agencies, such as the International Organization for Migration and the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees could include biometric travel solutions for individuals unable to renew their passports. The documents would have to be recognized as valid for travel through agreements among participating states.

A digital humanitarian passport could also leverage technologies such as self-sovereign identity (SSI), blockchain for data security and encrypted digital identity to ensure that dissidents are safe.

“The answer lies in avoiding centralized databases, which pose significant risks of misuse, breaches, and authoritarian control. Instead, a decentralized system could store biometric data locally – on devices or encrypted personal keys – ensuring that individuals maintain full control over their data,” the policy experts explain.

They acknowledge that there is “no known deliberate instances of democratic states compromising or leaking such data to authoritarian regimes.” But without a precedent for humanitarian passports, they argue, “Privacy and cybersecurity must be prioritized because authoritarian regimes have weaponized facial recognition and biometric surveillance to suppress dissent.”