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Sharon Rusu, former head of the IRB's Documentation Centre, was invited to speak at the joint EASO-ACCORD conference on COI methodology, but unfortunately had to cancel participation. With her kind permission, we're publishing the notes for the opening remarks she prepared. In them, Ms. Rusu gives insights into the early days of COI research and the development of quality standards.
Managing mixed flows of asylum-seekers and other migrants is a complex problem that puts pressure on asylum systems and poses profound legal and ethical questions. Receiving countries struggle to achieve the right balance between immigration control and refugee protection. Squaring domestic with international obligations poses an essential dilemma for receiving countries, not the least Canada at the inception, in 1989, of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (hereafter IRB).
In an article entitled, ‘The Information Aspects of Refugee Work — Time for a Full-Scale Information Strategy’’[1], published in the December 1988 issue of UNHCR’s Refugee Abstracts, Philip Rudge, with ECRE, and Morten Kjaerum, with the Danish Refugee Council, underlined ‘what ought always to have been self-evident, that the protection of refugees depends on policy-makers, practitioners and the general public having the best possible information available to them.’
My own experience as a member of the Refugee Status Advisory Committee (RSAC), the precursor to the IRB, resonated soundly with this view. The RSAC required its decision-makers in RSD to decide claims on the basis of transcripts, interviews of the refugee claimant by an immigration officer, without benefit of information on the countries of origin. Members looked to available sources, primarily Amnesty International and US State Department Reports. But too often, decisions were based solely on the decision-makers’ assessment of the claimant’s credibility. There was no requirement for members to review country reports, and no standards for those reports that were available, before rendering a decision. Decisions based on such inadequate information were of questionable fairness and often ended up at the Federal Court on appeal.
This lack of timely, verifiable and trustworthy country information troubled me at the time but had to wait for further development until 1989 with the launch of the IRB. Supported in its inception and development first by the report of Rabbi Gunther Plaut who, in 1985 underlined in his report on the elements of a new asylum procedure for Canada, the need for the ‘establishment of a Document Division…based on the belief that a maximum of knowledge – both of a claimant’s country of origin and pertinent law [would] greatly facilitate reaching fair decisions.’
As the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada (IRB) opened its doors in 1989, the first Chair, Gordon Fairweather, and Executive Director, Peter Harder, were instrumental in insuring that the budget and support for a nation-wide network of documentation centres was made real. The IRB Documentation Centre (hereafter IRBDC) was initiated with headquarters in Ottawa and 6 regional centres.
Though first asked to be a member of the IRB, I saw the opportunity to develop a system and methodology for informed decision-making and was honoured to become the first Chief, Research, IRB Documentation Centre Headquarters, Ottawa.
First, there was no internet and, second, unlike UNHCR’s Refugee Documentation Centre, the IRBDC had no access to documentalists trained in the art of selecting and abstracting refugee-relevant documents in several languages. Thus the first thing to do was to find out who was doing what where in asylum support, policy and research on refugees in Europe and the USA while at the same time recruiting staff who could hit the ground running to respond in English and French to the needs of IRB members.
I was encouraged and supported to visit documentation projects in Europe and the USA. These visits included talks with project staff and with government officials. Discussions led to promises of support and collaboration. This mission was revelatory as it was the beginning of the creation of a network of ‘like minds’ ready to share information and expertise towards a common goal – informing decision-makers and others on the situation in countries of origin that led to refugees fleeing persecution within the definition of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.
Within short order the IRB Documentation Centre was required to produce a statement of how it would support its mandate ‘to meet the information needs of the Convention Refugee Determination Division and the Immigration and Appeal Division along with serving as a public affairs and education resource on refugee, human rights and migration matters.’
A tall order, indeed, but shaped by past experience and the needs of the newly-formed IRB, an administrative tribunal whose rules on the admissibility of evidence required Board members to give more attention to the weight of the evidence rather than to formal or technical questions, the IRBDC came up with the following statement of objectives and principles summarized here:
Within the first year, three important challenges presented themselves.
The first was how best to develop a methodology for researchers in drafting Country Reports. The second, was how to train researchers in methods that were developing daily. The third was, in the absence of the internet, to ensure rapid electronic delivery of research reports to decision-makers and research support materials for IRBDC staff.
On the first, a method for analyzing COI was born out of necessity. The sources of information used by the IRBDC ranged widely; AI Reports, US State Department Country Assessments, reports of UN organs and regional and country human rights rapporteurs and analyses by non-governmental organizations such as the ICJ, European Council for Minority Rights Group, ECRE, Netherlands Institute for Human Rights, the Danish and Norwegian Refugee and Human Rights Councils, Documentation Réfugiés, Zentrale Dokumentationsstelle der Freien Wohlfartspflege für Flüchtlinge (ZDWF [2]), Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights plus boxes of reports arriving daily from the Foreign Broadcasting Information Service. All this data required review, classification and analysis to support the drafting of Country Reports. Looking to the principles enshrined in our mandate statement, we set about developing and articulating a methodology of COI practice.
The second was to train researchers in newly developing COI methods while supplying country reports to decision-makers, working in two official languages and always aware that the IRB was an administrative tribunal and our information was under constant scrutiny. Despite these challenges, we were continuously developing methods and training researchers at the same time. The IRBDC researchers were fundamental contributors to the development of COI at the IRB. Their contribution cannot be underestimated. They were committed to the cause of a just system of status determination in Canada through the development of a defensible method for reporting on a country’s rule of law…and it showed in the production of first-rate reports.
On the third, rapidly sharing information, we acquired a software programme, Inquire Text. This programme featured a strong relational capacity and was ideal for finding information using descriptors from UNHCR’s International Refugee Thesaurus. This programme permitted Board members and all related staff and lawyers access to IRB information including country reports and caselaw. With this programme, alongside the development of Country Reports, we were able to set out a series of responses to often asked country-specific questions which we offered to Board members as our ‘Question and Answer Series.’
Due to the popularity of the series, we were soon forced to limit questions solely to Board members as refugee lawyers across Canada and the USA nearly collapsed the system with requests. Instead, we opted to send out monthly hard copies of our Country Reports to governments and NGOs in the UK, Washington, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and UNHCR.
As noted earlier, COI methodology at the IRBDC accompanied the need to quickly produce Country Reports. For our first reports, our guide for researchers focused on the country at hand; its relevant historical facts, a chronology of significant events, current ‘publicly available’ information on political, ethnic, religious groups from the reports of human rights monitors and observers, newspapers, FBIS reports and the BBC World Service plus an extensive bibliography. We wanted to avoid biased or generalized assumptions about a country which flow from reports on, for example, constitutional guarantees which may not hold in practice and media and other accounts which often neglect information vital to a full understanding of the impact of events.
Where we found contradiction or were unsure of the provenance of a report, we looked for verification — not just one but three sources. If, from time to time, we received confidential information, to safeguard the source, we looked for publicly available corroboration of the information. We used to refer to this as ‘laundering at large.’[3]
Within a year, the guidance for Country Reports took shape as full blown COI research standards, guidance for research, drafting and most importantly training. Being able to clearly articulate the methods informing IRBDC reports spoke to the defensibility of the reports and admitted of challenge in our reporting.
As background to training in COI, our clear message to researchers was to instill in them a common view of the scope and potential sources of country of origin information. At the IRBDC, though we viewed COI as grounded in refugee and human rights law, its thematic scope went well beyond the human rights situation in any country.
Understanding of the political institutions, development and power relations, forms the background to understanding rationales and motives behind persecution. Sources providing a sound assessment of the security situation, including law enforcement, also needed to be covered in order to decide whether basic human rights are respected in practice, and whether the authorities in the country of origin are able and willing to provide protection against human rights violations.
At the same time, in training researchers, it was made clear to them that a refugee claim can present a wide range of issues for potential research often related to credibility. In determining the credibility of a claimant, decision-makers would need information on cultural and religious practices, ethnicity, geography, topography and the history of the country. As we progressed with training and the production of Country Reports, we soon learned that if the first decision was based on clearly documented COI relative to clearly identified facts, the claim was more likely to withstand both substantive and procedural challenges.
The IRBDC’s first COI methods are, in my view, the principle elements of today’s extensive COI research methodology and standards. Since these elements are the daily bread of COI research today, I will not belabour explanation of each as they are identified, well-documented, clearly articulated and admirably presented by EASO, ACCORD and others. Rather, I propose to highlight some of the definitions attached to the standards of that time when IRB researchers were required to meet the COI needs of decision-makers in an administrative tribunal.
In due course it became clear that further standards relating to the actual research process, framed and informed the work of COI researchers. Like the standards for the collection of COI, IRBDC researchers began to distinguish between the standards used to guide source selection and those for COI research in general. Over time, at the IRBDC, researchers distinguished these standards as first, substantive criteria, and second, as procedural criteria.
To maintain the highest possible standards in COI for decision support requires that both sets of standards are acknowledged and applied.
Five standards were agreed by IRBDC researchers to apply to the procedural side of COI: public domain, source protection, impartiality (neutrality), protection of personal data, transparency and accessibility. I propose to elaborate solely on public domain, impartiality, transparency and accessibility.
Now in its 30th year, the first steps of COI development within the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada are now being discussed, shared, further developed and applied in a large humanitarian context covering policy and practice in ways not initially envisaged. In short, COI is no longer a solitary art and practice — it is a well-respected, professional, global phenomenon.
Managing information to support refugee protection and humanitarian assistance has focussed attention on the need to ensure that core COI standards of relevance, reliability, timeliness and verifiability are recognized and applied in support of policy, planning, gap and risk analysis and resource mobilization. What thirty years ago was the practice of a few researchers in the little known art of information/documentation support for policy and asylum decisions is now a professional endeavour of some magnitude. Its authority derives from decisions by tribunals and superior courts where the information basis for decisions has been scrutinized and tested in relation to decisions on asylum claims. It has further benefited from the practice over time of a growing cadre of COI research professionals and field-based information managers in governments, NGOs and the UN system.
These events are noteworthy in themselves as they point to the recognition that such standards are central to decision-making; that without them decision-makers can and do get it wrong. Most importantly, they point to the power wrought by standards developed and shaped by COI professionals that now inform refugee protection, status determination and humanitarian information at all levels based on the shared belief that to be credible, information must be managed and shared according to standards that ensure its trustworthiness, timeliness and even-handedness.
Sharon Rusu
CEO OpCit Writers and Editors
Ottawa, Canada
5 September 2019
[1] https://academic.oup.com/rsq/article/7/4/1/1592092
[2] [note by ACCORD: ZDWF's archives were transferred to ACCORD upon the former's dissolution and the latter's creation.]
[2] Laundering at large can best be defined as seeking to protect the identity of the source of the information by looking for corroborating information in the public domain
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