The US Department of State released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, covering 2018.

UNHCR and the Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation (ACCORD), a department of the Austrian Red Cross, are partnering up for a streamlined content division between their protection information databases, Refworld and ecoi.net.

ACCORD published an Afghanistan report on the economic, humanitarian and security situation in three cities: Kabul, Herat and Mazar-e Sharif.

The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) published a practical guide on COI to assist judges and decision-makers in their use of COI. Additionally, EASO published an extensive judicial analysis produced by IARLJ-Europe on evidence and credibility assessment in the context of the Common European Asylum System. 

The Researcher is published two times a year by the Refugee Documentation Centre (RDC) in Ireland. It is a publication which combines academic papers, summaries of caselaw, guides to new legislation, reports of conferences, articles on RDC services and items of country of origin information.

The Austrian Federal Administrative Court and ACCORD organised a symposium in May 2018 to discuss the possibilities and limits of COI research.

UNHCR released new eligibility guidelines on Afghanistan, replacing the April 2016 guidelines.

In August 2018, we updated our country priorities. These priorities define which sources are covered on ecoi.net, i.e. which documents you can expect to find for a country. The update is based on Austrian, European and global asylum statistics and affects what sources we cover for what countries.

The European Asylum Support Office (EASO) has published its first country guidance, on Afghanistan. The country guidance represents the joint assessment of the situation in the country by senior-level policy officials from the EU member states. 

UNHCR released its annual Global Trends report, covering displacement that occurred during 2017. The report says the number of people forcibly displaced was 68.5 million at the end of 2017, leaving the population of forcibly displaced at another record high.