Study title

This database aims to assess the impacts of different inter-institutional architectures of asylum decision making on the human rights of asylum seekers. It is geared towards finding new institutional architectures of asylum determination instrumental to achieving high standards of asylum policy. It maps the different institutional compositions in asylum decision-making in the European Union, Canada and South Africa. The collection of data is based on practitioner and academic reports. They are either comparative in nature or country specific. For EU member states, the European Migration Network (EMN) provides a series of yearly national reports and comparative reports that provide useful information. For OECD member states, the “International Migration Outlook” (ex-SOPEMI reports) offers useful insights that add to, or supplement other sources. Another relevant source of (pluri-) annual reports is that of the Asylum Information Database (AIDA), managed by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE). In addition to second-hand sources, national laws published in official journals were used, resorting to automated translation where necessary. The whole process of data collection took about 12 months of research and coding. To maximise consistency across countries, data collection and coding for all 16 countries was done by the same person, on the basis of instructions elaborated collegially. A detailed list of references is provided in the documentation section. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.