Julia Castro-John

Law

Please tell us about your research project.

At the University of Oxford, I am continuing my doctoral research in law, which examines how the use of artificial intelligence at the European Union’s external borders affects human rights. This subject fascinates me because it concerns the use of AI at the heart of one of the state’s oldest prerogatives: deciding who may enter its territory. As a legal scholar, I am particularly interested in how AI reshapes the exercise of this power and what this means for the legal safeguards intended to protect those subject to it.
 

Two questions keep drawing me back. First, how do these systems affect the ability of migrants and asylum seekers to exercise their rights, including seeking asylum and being protected from return to danger? Second, if their rights are infringed, how can they obtain an effective remedy, and how should responsibility be attributed?

Beyond my thesis, one concern runs through my research: understanding how AI redistributes power, and what the law must require for that power to remain accountable. I pursue it at the crossroads of international law, human rights law and EU law, and across three sets of relationships: between the state and those subject to its authority; between the state and private economic actors; and between states themselves, as digital inequalities shape new claims to sovereignty. The same curiosity draws me to other questions of public law, wherever the balance between power and rights is being reshaped.

My research is supervised by Professor Julian Fernandez (Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas) and Professor Nathalie Smuha (University of Toronto).

If any of this resonates with your own work, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please do write to me!

Could you please tell us a bit more about your scholarship/exchange programme?

I am a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, under the supervision of Professor Matthew Gibney. The RSC is one of the world’s leading centres for research on forced migration, and I could hardly have hoped for a better place to be! Fellows can present their work, convene seminars or simply attend them, join classes, and gain access to the wider life of the University of Oxford. Visiting fellowships are awarded through the Centre’s own application process, and some come with funding. Applicants submit:

• a research proposal for the stay
• a cover letter and a CV
• academic references
• proof of English proficiency

I am also a resident researcher at the Maison Française d’Oxford, and I count myself lucky! The MFO is home to a vibrant academic life and a natural crossroads between disciplines. It offers the conditions researchers dream of: a library open around the clock, a thoughtfully curated academic and cultural programme and a garden where, on a good day, you might cross paths with squirrels…

First impressions of Oxford / the University?

I expected an excellent university and a beautiful city. What I had not anticipated was how open and welcoming it would feel.

Oxford also offers ideal conditions for making progress with your research. The libraries, archives, cafés and wider academic environment all contribute to that. And there is something almost magical about a place where centuries of scholarship are part of the everyday landscape, and where, over an ordinary dinner, you may find yourself discussing the same idea with an engineer, a classicist and a physicist…

Being in Oxford means being surrounded by kind, spirited and brilliant people who remind you why being a researcher is the best job ever!