An investigation by The New Humanitarian suggests the Readmission Case Management System, or RCMS, may have been used to deport migrants who had legal permission to stay in the EU, as well as asylum seekers who only agreed to be sent home to avoid detention.

While these cases represent a small fraction of the voluntary and forced removals processed via RCMS, they highlight the potential for the tool to facilitate rights violations, including deportations to countries where asylum seekers are likely to face persecution, which would contravene a key principle of international human rights law known as non-refoulement.

“The main problem is that the potential for human rights issues pertaining to refoulement and personal data are high, and IOM deploys the system without safeguards in place,” a former IOM staff member told The New Humanitarian, requesting anonymity to avoid professional reprisals.

“Once the system is deployed, it becomes a purely state-to-state tool,” they said. “IOM at no point can ensure who, on what conditions, and with what safeguards, gets deported.”

Starting in 2017, IOM oversaw the development of separate RCMS platforms for Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The tool comes into play after a migrant has been ordered to leave the EU. Border authorities in these countries can use RCMS to correspond in real time with their European counterparts, exchange migrants’ personal and biometric data, set up interviews, and issue travel documents.

One of the tech firms IOM hired to develop RCMS has described it as “a collaborative and transparent platform to re-admit deportees” to their origin countries. An IOM brochure for the newest version of the tool says it “significantly reduces delays in manual case processing”.

Beyond the three countries chosen by the EU and IOM to use RCMS, dozens of additional countries have gained access to the tool without the agency’s involvement or oversight, facilitating countless deportations by countries with varying human rights records.

To maintain RCMS in Bangladesh, IOM hired a tech firm that had previously built similar products for the country’s Rapid Action Battalion, a US-sanctioned elite police unit alleged to be a death squad.

IOM’s role in developing RCMS builds on a growing trend of humanitarian actors adopting technologies that states might use for non-humanitarian purposes. It also coincides with the agency’s involvement in other border enforcement activities, such as managing an American migrant detention facility in Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, and signing on to help the US remove migrants amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown.

Giulio Coppi, senior humanitarian officer at the digital rights advocacy group Access Now, said RCMS exemplifies IOM’s drift away from humanitarian principles “to function more as an on-demand migration control support role for governments”.

The former IOM staff member said RCMS makes the agency “a tool of the EU externalisation policy”, in which wealthy countries outsource migration control responsibilities to other countries or organisations. They added that RCMS might exacerbate abuses by “increasing the capacity of states to handle much larger caseloads” of deportees.

Asked about potential benefits for migrants or asylum seekers from the use of RCMS, the former IOM staff member said these were “hard to find”. While IOM has claimed it can shorten detention times, evidence from governments on this has not been shared, they added. RCMS is not linked to asylum databases, so the merit of international protection claims is outside its remit.

In response to questions about RCMS, an IOM spokesperson told The New Humanitarian that the agency does not assess states’ decisions about migrant removals, conduct forced returns, manage or operate the systems it provides to governments, or access personal data processed through those systems.

“IOM’s role is limited to capacity development, policy, legal, and operational support, to ensure that returns are safe, dignified, [and] rights-based in line with international standards,” the spokesperson said.

When asked how IOM ensures that returns are safe, dignified, and rights-based, the spokesperson said: “States, not IOM, are responsible.”