Governing Biometric AI in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings: A Human Rights and Data Privacy Framework for the MENA Region

This policy monograph examines the governance challenges of high-impact biometric artificial intelligence (AI) in fragile and conflict-affected (FCV) settings, focusing on Yemen and the broader MENA region. To address operational implementation gaps in existing frameworks, it introduces the MENA Human Rights, Data Protection, and Biometric AI Governance (MENA-HRDP-BAG) Framework. The framework operationalizes five sequential mechanisms—Biometric AI Impact Assessment (BAIIA), Institutional Readiness Threshold (IRT), Context-Sensitive Trigger (CST), Alternative Verification Pathway (AVP), and Safe-Failure Principle (SFP)—to enforce the "Governance Before Scale" paradigm across vulnerable and crisis-affected digital identity systems.