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Refugee and Asylum Seeker Law

Comparative tools

Global asylum trends from UNHCR

Global case law portal

Finding refugee decisions is not easy. No one source is comprehensive in coverage, so locating decisions from specific jurisdictions may require using multiple free and subscription sources, such as the tribunal websites, the LIIs (NZLII, SAFLII etc), and subscription sources which include lower courts and tribunals on eg: Lexis.

Multijurisdictional case finders such as Refworld's Cases database is a good place to start. Refworld includes full text cases from more than 45 national jurisdictions, as well as international judgments and decisions from the International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and other international and regional courts.

Global legislation portal

RefWorld can be used to find domestic legislation on nationality/citizenship/statelessness and refugees/asylum seekers. Select 'Collections' from the top blue menu bar and select 'legal instruments'. You can then narrow the search by type, country and topic.

Alternatively, select 'Browse by' and 'Thematic area' to find legal instruments pertaining to a specific topic, eg Asylum and Migration.

Domestic refugee courts and tribunals

To identify the courts and tribunals that deal with refugee and asylum seeker issues in a particular country, use the jurisdiction tabs in this Guide for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the US.

For countries not included in our guide, use the National Refugee Law page on the RefLaw blog - this provides an alphabetical list of countries and courts.

Finding worldwide citations of cases

LawCite is a free worldwide citator that will link to cases provided on the LII databases (PacLII, NZLII, LII of India etc) in all jurisdictions worldwide that have cited your case, as long as those jurisdictions have LIIs.   

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