Asylum Research Centre (ARC), formerly Asylum Research Consultancy, was set up by Liz Williams and Stephanie Huber in 2010. In 2016 ARC Foundation was incorporated as a charitable incorporated organisation. Our aim is to raise standards in the production and use of COI and the refugee status determination process as a whole, to improve the realisation of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ rights and entitlements and to ensure that those in need of protection are recognised as such.
ARC Foundation undertakes research, advocacy and training to improve the quality of refugee status determination
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COI Updates
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17/09/2019
COI Update Vol. 201
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04/09/2019
COI Update Vol. 200
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25/07/2019
COI Update Vol. 199
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10/07/2019
COI Update Vol. 198
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25/06/2019
COI Update Vol. 197
New Publications
News
- September 2019
ARC Foundation updated its Thematic COI Sources toolkit, which can be downloaded for free here.
- August 2019
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust has awarded us 3 years of project funding to undertake a comparative analysis of the full content of ten of the 2016 U.S. Department of State’s annual human rights reports compared to subsequent editions produced by the current U.S. administration’s first term in office. Omissions and improvements in the human rights situations will be analysed with respect to whether they are reflective of the situation on the ground.
- August 2019
ARC Foundation is seeking new Trustees to join its Board of Trustees. Deadline for applications: 8th September 2019. More information on the role and how to apply can be found here.
- May 2019
We are pleased to announce the publication of our PHF-funded report Albania: Trafficked Boys and Young Men, produced in collaboration with Asylos today.
The critical need to prioritise country of origin information production on children and young people’s risk profiles has become increasingly apparent as lawyers are consistently raising concerns to us about the scarcity of available information in relation to child-specific persecution and harm acting as a barrier to proper consideration of young people’s protection claims.This is especially stark in the UK as Albanian children regularly form one of the top five largest groups of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, yet not one was granted asylum or humanitarian protection in 2018 despite Albania being the third-most prominent foreign country of origin for trafficked children identified in the UK in 2018.Our report combines relevant and timely publicly available material with new information generated by interviewing ten individuals with authoritative knowledge on the topic. It helps fill the gap in the COI literature and to contribute to a more transparent and informed debate about the topic.You can access the report here and the associated press release here.
UK Legal representatives using this report are advised to also read Garden Court Chambers paper analysing the reports’ main findings and providing practical guidance of how to apply them to your cases. The paper can be found here.
- January 2019
ARC Foundation is thrilled to have been awarded a three year grant by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to review country information published by the UK Home Office and the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) and to advocate for improvements in the quality of these products in order to raise refugee determination standards at the UK and European level.