Access Now-led global #BanBS coalition against biometric surveillance (2021–ongoing)

On 7 June 2021, Access Now convened a global open letter signed by more than 175 civil society organisations, activists, researchers, and technologists from 55 countries — launching the #BanBS (Ban Biometric Surveillance) coalition. Drafted jointly by Access Now, Amnesty International, European Digital Rights (EDRi), Human Rights Watch, the Internet Freedom Foundation (India), and the Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor (IDEC, Brazil), the letter demands that governments, courts, companies, investors, and international bodies adopt or enforce bans — not safeguards or regulatory oversight — on facial recognition and remote biometric recognition technologies enabling mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance. The coalition grew to 178 signatories by 16 June and beyond 200 organisations in the months following launch; the open letter became available in 17+ languages, and the campaign remains active as of 2025–2026.

The "ban not regulate" position

The letter's core stance — recorded on the Access Now campaign page as the claim that no technical or legal safeguard can adequately address the inherent risks these technologies pose — was publicly articulated by Access Now's Daniel Leufer as the view that "the window for regulating such technologies has passed". Framing an outright prohibition rather than a regulatory framework as the only adequate response distinguished the #BanBS letter from parallel civil-society engagements with AI Act consultations, national data-protection proceedings, and city-level moratorium campaigns, which worked within existing governance structures rather than challenging them. The Amnesty International press release anchored this position in the verbatim framing: "these tools have the capacity to identify, follow, single out, and track people everywhere they go. The potential for abuse is too great, and the consequences too severe."

What the letter demands

The open letter addresses four categories of actors:

Governments are called on to: (1) cease all public investment in uses of facial recognition and remote biometric technologies enabling mass surveillance or discriminatory targeted surveillance; (2) adopt laws prohibiting such use in publicly accessible spaces by both public bodies and private entities; (3) exclude biometric surveillance data from use as criminal evidence; and (4) protect individuals against automated decision-making using biometric data affecting their economic and social rights.

Private companies are called on to stop the creation, development, sale, and deployment of facial recognition and remote biometric recognition technologies for mass surveillance and discriminatory targeted surveillance purposes.

Investors are called on to pressure portfolio companies to cease development and deployment of these technologies.

International organisations — including the UN and its specialised agencies — are called on to develop and enforce international standards against these technologies.

The three specific deployment categories named for prohibition are: remote facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces; mass tracking via gait analysis and biometric behavioural data; and predictions and inferences from biometric characteristics about protected attributes including gender identity, sexuality, emotional state, and ethnicity.

The coalition and its global reach

The 175+ founding signatories span sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America, drawn from digital-rights organisations, civil liberties and human rights bodies, trade unions, tech-worker advocacy groups, and individual researchers. Named coalition members alongside the six co-drafting organisations include Privacy International and Big Brother Watch; the broader European digital-rights network that co-drafted and signed the parallel Reclaim Your Face campaign — including AlgorithmWatch, Bits of Freedom, La Quadrature du Net, and the Panoptykon Foundation — are among those on the 178-organisation count.

The geographic breadth was deliberate. The coalition cited documented abuse cases in China, Russia, Myanmar, Argentina, Brazil, the United States, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Thailand to counter any framing that the ban demand was a specifically European or North American preference. The 17+ language translations extended the open letter's reach beyond civil society organisations operating in English-language policy registers, and the campaign was designed from the outset to support advocates fighting biometric surveillance at every level, from city council to the UN.

Relationship to regional campaigns

The #BanBS coalition functions as an international umbrella explicitly linking three regional campaigns:

Reclaim Your Face (European Union, EDRi-coordinated) — the European Citizens' Initiative campaign demanding a prohibition on biometric mass surveillance in public space under EU law, launched October 2020 in deliberate parallel to the global mobilisation. EDRi's June 16 announcement explicitly frames the #BanBS global coalition as providing political support for the ECI by countering arguments that the ban demand is "unrealistic" — the international signatory base made that claim harder to sustain in European institutional settings.

Project Panoptic (India, Internet Freedom Foundation) — IFF's campaign tracking Indian government procurement and deployment of facial recognition technologies, framing these as threats to constitutional rights to privacy and non-discrimination. IFF co-drafted the global letter, supplying the South Asian civil-society anchor and connecting Project Panoptic's city-pressure register to the global frame.

Ban the Scan (New York City, Amnesty International USA) — Amnesty's city-level campaign documenting and demanding an end to the NYPD's facial recognition technology use, anchored on Amnesty's 2021 report mapping the NYPD's FRT infrastructure. Ban the Scan supplied the specific US municipal case through which the global letter's demand connected to a concrete jurisdiction with active litigation and civil society pressure. The msg-banthescan framing records the campaign's slogan separately from the international #BanBS register.

Framing in the corpus

The msg-ban-biometric-mass-surveillance message entity records the broader "ban biometric mass surveillance" framing that the #BanBS coalition shares with the EDRi-coordinated European campaigns; the corpus distinguishes the message as a propagating artefact from the #BanBS campaign as the organisational vehicle through which Access Now took that demand onto the global record.

Significance

The #BanBS coalition occupies a distinctive position in the corpus's international architecture on three counts. First, it is the broadest-signatory global civil society coalition demanding an outright prohibition — not a moratorium, regulatory framework, or oversight regime — on biometric surveillance in publicly accessible spaces, providing a standing 55-country civil-society mandate that national and regional campaigns can invoke when making the case that the ban demand has global support. Second, its launch in June 2021 followed the European Commission's AI Act proposal by approximately seven weeks; the prohibition language the #BanBS letter named travelled into the EU AI Act civil-society statements coordinated by EDRi through 2021–2024, and partial prohibition language on remote biometric identification survived into the final 21 May 2024 EU AI Act. Third, its multilingual, multi-continental mobilisation profile differs structurally from the corpus's other biometric-surveillance entries: it is less a campaign against specific deployments and more a standing international commitment anchoring the political case that prohibition — not regulation — is the right policy response, which gives local campaigns a global reference point without requiring coordination with Brussels-based coalition machinery.