Sanctuary Information Project

A joint project between City of Sanctuary and the Northern Refugee Centre to help unrepresented asylum seekers

This section covers some of the key aspects of using the Internet to help research country information and to use generally as a resource for immigration help and advice.

This is designed as a starting point for you to explore the resources there are.  You should follow it up with your own work and research.  It is a good idea to spend time exploring each resource so that you are fully aware of what it can offer.

Some of these resource are accessible from the NRC Advisers Network Page menu.

On this short course we will cover the following areas:

· Using Internet Explorer for fun and profit – basic skills and shortcuts

·Quick access to statutory material and cases.

· Link sites and ‘library’ sites including the Electronic Immigration Network

· The major human rights country information sites [or ‘how to make your appeal bundle fat but friendly’].

· Using search engines

· E-mail updates

Using Internet Explorer (or Firefox) for fun and profit

Basics (teaching grandpa to suck eggs...)

The address bar on IE is where you type the URL (uniform resource locator).  This is the address that computers serving the Internet use to ask the other computers to send you the web page you want.

Often you will find that instead of typing URL’s you are instead clicking on hypertext links to take you to other pages and other sites. 

Hyper-links are often underlined or are words that change colour as your mouse passes over them.  Graphics can also be hyperlinks.  Your mouse pointer will change to a hand with a pointing finger when it passes over a hyperlink.

I find it useful when searching through documents to have the maximum amount of text on the screen.  You can get rid of the menu bar, header, status bar and windows taskbar by hitting the ‘F11’ function key on your keyboard or the ‘Full screen’ icon on the standard buttons bar.

Try it now!

Although some web pages have fiddly ways of stopping you changing the size of the text you are reading, in most cases you can alter the font size by clicking on ‘View’ then ‘Text size’.  You may also have a button on your bar with two A’s marked ‘size’.  In Firefox you can alter text size by use Ctrl and + or - at the same time.

You can save any document you view to your own computer, so you can view it later.  You may want to save the document in your client’s file in Immigration Matters, or have your own folders created for this purpose.

To save click on ‘File’ then ‘Save As …’, on the menu bar.  You should save as ‘Web Page complete’, if you want to save the graphics on the page as well as the text.

Do not forget that you can use the history icon (usually a sundial) to view a list of the sites and the pages that you have visited.  You can then select these to revisit ones that were of interest.

You can save the address of the web page you are on as if it were a bookmark in a book.  Do this by clicking on ‘Favorites’ on the menu bar, then ‘Add to favorites’.  In Firefox the term used is 'bookmarks' instead

Finding a word in a document

From the menu bar select ‘Find’ and in the dialogue box that comes up type in the word that you are looking for. 

This is useful if you are opening the results of searches on search engines.  You can quickly repeat the word in your search to see what the web page says about it in context, to see if it is of any use.

This is particularly useful if you are going through internet search results which, when you go to the website reveals a large document.

You should already have come across files in Adobe Acrobat format - examples are Home Office and Visa application forms, user manuals and so on.

Adobe Acrobat files have the file extension (the three letters after the dot) ‘.pdf’ e.g. “IM2A.pdf”.  If I were a smarty-pants I would tell you it stands for ‘portable document format’.  PDF files look the same regardless of which computer they are viewed on because all the formatting and graphics are preserved in the one file.

IE and Firefox have an ‘Adobe Acrobat Reader’ to help view these documents - it can be downloaded if you don't.  It will be started automatically every time that you open or click on a link to a PDF.

Acrobat files are useful because, though they are usually large and may take some time to appear on your screen, they contain indexes, can be searched, and look like the original document when printed (unlike html files – i.e. web pages).

When using Acrobat reader you get extra toolbars and a sidebar – even though this all appears within the IE window.

Text selection [the T button] – use this to change the mouse cursor so that you can highlight and copy a passage of text – useful for putting things directly into skeleton arguments.

Enlarge/Reduce [the magnifying glass] – click to zoom in or out.

Printing - click on the printer button in acrobat reader in order to print – do not use the button on the Internet Explorer toolbars.

Search – binoculars – search for text.  Particularly useful for large country reports where you are only after a particular phrase or piece of information.  It will open a pane on the right of the window which will list the occurrences in context.

Search again – binoculars and arrow to find the next occurrence of the word you are searching for

Save -  the picture of a floppy disk. This saves the document to your hard drive (or any other storage medium).  If this is not available [because it can be disabled by the site from which it is obtained], then there is a way round it.  Go back to the link and right click on it then select ‘Save Target As…’.  Do not use the ‘save’ or ‘save as’ options on the Internet Explorer toolbars.

You can also click on the bookmarks in the bookmark pain to go through the document or on the page forward/back arrow buttons. 

Quick access to statutory material and cases

Much of the reference material that you can use is also available on the Internet.

Statutes and Statutory instruments

The advantage of 'paid for' materials such as Butterworths etc is that the amendments to Acts etc are included.  The main source of statutory material online is the OPSI website (formerly HMSO) , and this simply contains the raw material e.g “In section 2(a) of the act for ‘from abroad’ insert ‘subject to immigration control’.”

Nevertheless, the raw material online is available much quicker online than in Butterworths, is cheaper, and you can cut and paste extracts into your word processor.

Policy

The bulk of home office policy is now available on the Internet on the IND web-site.  This is split into Asylum and non-asylum instructions (Immigration Directorate Instructions or IDI’s) as well as Operational Procedures, Nationality instructions and so on.

This policy is invaluable as a guide to how the IND will deal with particular applications, on procedure, and on where discretion will be exercised outside the Rules.  You cannot have a comprehensive knowledge of immigration law without an appreciation of the major concessions and guidance within the instructions.

Case Reports

EIN should be the major source of immigration case material and it’s searchable database and access to IAT decisions is not available elsewhere.

However, there are other sources of case information.  These include BAILII - British and Irish Legal Information Institute - http://www.bailii.org  and other sites.

For country information and also information on practice rules and procedure, one of the main source of relevant cases is the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal's own website at http://www.ait.gov.uk.  This site contains country determinations made by the AIT that must be applied to similar applications by appellants from the same country.

For decisions in the High Court and Court of Appeal, the Courts service website has a searchable case database with decisions including selected immigration cases. The House of Lords website contains those cases that reach there, again including a handful of leading immigration cases each year.

Link Sites & library sites

Link sites or pages< are  collections of ‘hyperlinks’ to other sites which contain useful information.  The resources pages of EIN are an example.

‘Library’ sites is not a term used here to mean links to public or university libraries, but to sites that contain collections of reports, documents and other useful material on that site itself.

Electronic Immigration Network

This is a subscription site in relation to country material, which is provided by HJT training. You need to enter a username and password to get at the members information, which also includes a searchable database of case reports.

If you work regularly on cases it is useful to check the members home page to see if there are any new country reports or cases affecting the countries that are relevant to your cases.

EIN also has a consolidated list of AIT country guideline cases for members at:

http://www.ein.org.uk/members/resources/full.shtml?x=180317  and a list of  country info sites at: http://www.ein.org.uk/members/resources/#Country_/_Human_Rights_Reports

 www.asylumlaw.org

This has full copies of country reports etc. from many different organisations and sources organised in a searchable country index (although this was not working when I tried it recently).

It also operates as a search engine for documents on multiple human rights sites of other organisations such as the UN.

European Country of Origin Information – www.ecoi.net

This also has a collection of documents stored in their database rather than accessible from links to the original sites.

You can search by country as well but although this contains the major human rights and country reports the in depth material is sparse for smaller countries.  Many of the useful press articles are not recent, suggesting that the resources put to updating this site have reduce since 2005.

It does however, link to the ‘Refugee Reader’ which is on a separate site containing international materials on the law of refugee protection, and has some maps and links to country background material.

Reliefweb  - www.reliefweb.int

This has press reports, aid organisation reports, news releases and human rights information that you can search for or view per country/area on a chronological basis.  It will show reports from the past few days but you can search back much further.  You can restrict your reading in each country section to news reports or government reports or NGO reports etc.

It looks at country information from the point of view of emergencies and natural disaster.  In these areas it is bang up to date.

Look at each of these sites for information on Somalia and on Yemen. In particular compare how recent the reports are for each site. Also, which would be the best site to look at for information on the safety of Somali refugees fleeing conflicts.

The major human rights country information sites

One can probably say that you should not have prepared a bundle for an appeal without looking at the following sites, some of which we have already dealt with.:

US State Department Human Rights Reports

http://www.state.gov/g/drl/hr/c1470.htm

Though sometimes conservative, these reports are relied upon a lot by the Home Office and Immigration judges.  For an alternative view  you can look at IAS and other critiques of these reports.

United Nations High Commission for Refugees

http://www.unhcr.ch/research/rsd.htm

Amnesty International – http://web.amnesty.org/library/engindex

Human Rights Watch – http://www.hrw.org

Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board - http://www.irb-cisr.gc.ca/en/index_e.htm  

Reliefweb – www.reliefweb.int

Home Office Border and Immigration Agency Country Specific Policy  - www.ind.homeoffice.gov.uk/lawandpolicy/countryspecificasylumpolicy

Home Office RDS - Country of Origin Information reports - www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/country_reports.html.

These are not listed in this document but you will often find a source of specific news and reports for a country that is more detailed or up to date or news based than

Human Rights is not all there is

Whilst the main focus of the above sites is human rights, this is not necessarily what will produce the ‘killer’ piece of information for a case.

Information available from the Internet can establish, for instance:

• the existence of a particular person, e.g. a political leader, relevant to the case; or
• background information on any aspect of your client’s story which would verify his credibility – if his/her story is consistent on facts that may not even relate to the persecution it could have a knock-on effect on his credibility regarding the material facts.
• The existence of certain procedures, agreements, practices – in the past crucial information for appeals have been the confirmation of security agreements and practices between Malta and Libya; security checking procedures for Iranians leaving through an airport; risk of rape of unaccompanied young women in Ethiopia; and so on.

The thing to remember is that this sort of information is not going to be held in a human rights report in every case. 

The most useful source of information after the human rights sites are news sites.  These can be the sites of newspapers [whether the Times, the Malta Times or the Yemen Times to name three examples], news agencies, broadcasters such as the BBC, or collections of reports from all of these sources on other sites.

This leads us on to how we find information of this nature….

Search engines

Search engines are searchable databases that store all the significant words used on a web page and allows you to search against them. Sometimes other documents on the Internet are indexed – Google indexes postings on newsgroups and the text of PDF documents.

The best and most useful search engines are on the links page.

Google – my most favourite search engine

Searching on the Internet can be an art.  Some search engines allow boolean searches.  This means that you can use AND, NOT, OR to refine searches.  Others achieve the same thing by using the minus and plus signs as well.

For instance, say you wanted information about Congo Kinshasa but not Congo Brazzaville.  You might use the boolean search:

Congo Kinshasa OR Zaire NOT Brazzaville

An easier way, though, is to use Google's 'advanced search' functions:

Exact Phrase< - You can also be sure that you search for an exact match to a phrase by putting it in apostrophes or quote marks - e.g. "Abdul Mubarak" .  This means that instead of any document with Abdul and Mubarak (e.g. lots of University class lists will have somebody called Abdul and somebody else called Mubarak) you will get only documents with the names next to each other and in that order.  You will thus identify the right person.  The second Google search box does this for you.

With at least one of the words – this is an alternative to using ‘OR’.  For instance if you wanted to search for a document on human rights abuses whilst in custody – you might want to put both prison and jail.

Without the words – This is the equivalent of using a ‘-‘ (minus sign), to exclude a word you do not want.  For instance you might want to search for Congo and Kabila without finding documents about the late Joseph Kabila but including those about Laurent Kabila.  Just put ‘Joseph’ in this box to exclude documents about him.

Other tricks:

Wildcard – put an asterix to symbolise missing letters or words in a phrase e.g. "Courier New"'>“To be or not to *” .

Synonyms – put a tilda (~) before a word when you want to use a synonym (similar word) to it when you search.  For instance Yemen ~abuse will come up with reports  containing the words assault, abusing, abused, abuses, violence.

Site Search -  if you just want to search one internet site, e.g. just the IND website, you can tell Google to do this by using the phrase: site:www.ind.homeoffice.org.uk followed by the words you want to search for.

Words in a document title – to restrict your search to words that are in the title of a document you can use the word allintitle followed by a colon and the word(s), e.g.

allintitle:Yemen abuse

Exercise:
Using Google try to find the names of any gay men killed in Iran for practising homosexuality and the dates upon which this happened.

E-mailings

Country information and news reports can also now be obtained all over the internet.  Not only is it possible to obtain news reports from things such as RSS feeds, you can also get digests e-mailed to your door.

Frank’s List

http://www.frankslist.info/ - you can subscribe to this and get a weekly mailing containing all sorts of news reports on asylum, immigration, conflict and rights.

Refugee Legal Group

Additionally, if you are a professional in a reputable organisation, you may subscribe (£25 per year) to the Refugee Legal Group, and be permitted to join them on Google Groups.  You can read the e-mails there or have them e-mailed to you.