(CRiTERIA) Comprehensive data-driven Risk and Threat Assessment Methods for the Early and Reliable Identification, Validation and Analysis of migration-related risks
Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme
Grant Agreement: 101021866
Duration: 36 months
Start date: 1/09/2021
The project official website
The borders of the European Union are constantly subject to multiple challenges, from rising waves of illegal migration, to human trafficking, and threats to public health. In recent months, in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown new and serious threats to border security across Europe, leading to extend controls to the health sphere, to sudden and unexpected closures of internal borders within EU countries or to introducing new tools to manage the vulnerability of border security personnel to COVID-19 infection.
This situation indicates that contemporary challenges to border security are complex and interlinked, requiring increased cross-sectoral, transdisciplinary and transnational cooperation at all stages of risk management, both at EU and Member State level. This is a situation that current risk analysis models, such as those used by mandated agencies, such as CIRAM (Common Integrated Risk Analysis Model) and vulnerability assessment frameworks, seem to fail to fully capture and analyse.
In this framework, the aim of the CRiTERIA project is to contribute to the definition of a new risk and vulnerability analysis framework, comprehensive and human rights sensitive, but applicable for border agencies. A framework that supports a new ‘multi-perspective’ risk and vulnerability analysis methodology, which makes use of ‘multisource’ and ‘multilingual’ technologies and analysis tools to serve the complex indicators of the methodology and to make them accessible in a verifiable and understandable way.
In such a framework, the goal of the CRiTERIA project is contributing to develop a novel, comprehensive but feasible and human-rights sensitive risk and vulnerability analysis framework for border agencies, which backs a novel multi-perspective risk and vulnerability analysis methodology with multi-source, multi-lingual analysis technologies and tools for serving the complex indicators of the methodology and for making them accessible, verifiable, and understandable).
In order to achieve this aim, the CRiTERIA Project was organised into 9 work packages, divided into 4 tracks. The first track (Fundamental Track) will deal with the general approach of the activities. The second track (Methodology Track) will focus on the development of the extended risk analysis methodology, while the third track (Technology Track) will concentrate on the development of technologies to support the identification and analysis of migration risks, as well as the integration of these technologies into the “CRiTERIA System”. Finally, the fourth track (Impact Track) will work on the validation of the methods and tools developed through pilot activities and on the dissemination and exploitation of the obtained results.
The project will be carried out by a consortium of 15 European partners coordinated by the Leibniz University of Hannover.