The Immigration and Naturalization Service in the Netherlands is the first governmental agency to formally adopt "Refworld as its main information tool in determining asylum claims." This UNHCR press release announced an MOU between the Netherlands and UNHCR that provides financial support to Refworld and helps ensure continued development of its protection and country of origin information databases.
Once upon a time, undertaking country of origin information research for refugee status determination purposes was much more time-consuming. It required seeking out and consulting a wide variety of scattered information sources. While the advent of the Internet made it a bit easier to access certain types of information, researchers still had to do a lot of legwork; see, e.g., this bibliography of human rights, country and legal information resources on the Internet that I compiled back in 2002.
Today the technology has sufficiently advanced that information systems like Refworld and ecoi.net can assemble and organize most of these resources under one roof. This means they can be browsed in meaningful ways and they are searchable. While these systems make certain aspects of COI research much more straightforward, they also require researchers to master the art of full-text searching and retrieval. UNHCR's Status Determination and Protection Information Section already offers trainings on Refworld. But it will be interesting to see to what extent the "module on country information in refugee status determination procedures" they have promised will also address digital information literacy.
Tagged Websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment