Mapping paper on NGOs working on COI in Europe published by ARC & DCR
Asylum Research Consultancy (ARC) and the Dutch Council for Refugees (DCR) published a mapping paper on NGO actors working on Country of Origin Information in Europe.
In 2011 Asylum Research Consultancy (ARC) and the Dutch Council for Refugees (DCR) met in Budapest for the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC) conference ‘Evidence and Country of Origin Information (COI) in the practice of European Courts’. This Conference was part of the HHC’s project on ‘COI in Judicial Practice’, which sought to map the structural differences and access to COI in judicial review procedures across Europe. The conference mainly brought together Immigration Judges from across Europe, but also NGO representatives, COI researchers and academics. Whilst co-ordination already exists between State COI Units, especially in light of the developments in the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), we became aware of how little we knew of other NGOs working in COI research across Europe, and how such COI was being used in refugee status decision making.
We developed the idea to map the NGO actors working on COI and to identify whether there was an interest amongst these organisations to build a network to support each other in the work we do at the national level and at the same time to see whether we could find a way to jointly respond to developments at the European level in relation to COI.
This report summarises the answers to a questionnaire completed in July 2012 and updated information received in July 2013 to 23 participating organisations with the aim of providing a platform for future engagement and collaboration. (ARC & DCR, October 2013, p.2)
You can read the report here: ARC – Asylum Research Consultancy & DCR – Dutch Council for Refugees: NGOs working on Country of Origin Information in Europe: A mapping exercise, October 2013
