The US Department of State released its annual report on international religious freedom. This year, the USDOS changes the reporting period of the reports, shifting to a calendar year. The current issue of the report covers July-December 2010.

Fleeing Homophobia, a project by COC Nederland and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has published a report on differences in the examination of LGBTI asylum applications in member states of the European Union. The report also contains a chapter on Country of Origin Information (COI) in the LGBTI context.

A country page for the world’s most recent inedependent nation, the Republic of South Sudan, is now available on ecoi.net.

As part of our changes to celebrate ecoi.net’s 10th anniversary, we are establishing a blog on which we will inform about new developments regarding ecoi.net’s work, important new publications* and about news in the field of COI research.

The Researcher is published three 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.

ecoi.net went online in 2001. We now introduce “featured topics” for focus countries and improved the site’s performance. Look forward to further developments in the coming weeks.

The Researcher is published three 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.

To facilitate access to our personalisation features, most notably the research baskets, you can now choose to “stay logged in”.

In September, ecoi.net conducted a usability survey. Click on “read more” to see how our users responded.

The head of the UN refugee agency, António Guterres, marked UNHCR’s 60th anniversary by appealing for strengthened global impetus in tackling the world’s new and fast-evolving displacement and statelessness problems.