“Country and expert evidence is indispensable in supporting an asylum seeker’s case. Asylos helps me – and immigration officials – better understand my client’s circumstances.”

– Tori Sicher, Sutovic & Hartigan

Asylos is a small charity helping lawyers and refugees prove asylum cases by producing free individual research reports. This week is Refugee Week and as a trustee of Asylos I thought this would be a good time to make sure you know about the organisation!

Lawyers and NGO caseworkers supporting refugees through asylum systems around the world submit Asylos’s reports in administrative and judicial proceedings, use them to inform their arguments, or as reference guides to wider source material. Reports cover everything from access to dialysis in Nigeria to political persecution in Iran or LGBT rights in El Salvador. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can request a bespoke report for your client’s case.

“This research is extremely coherent and helpful. I’m amazed that you’ve got to the lengths of interviewing people. This is going to be a huge asset to the case.”

– Alexa Sidor, Elder Rahimi Solicitors

The Asylos mission is to ensure that asylum seekers and their lawyers have access to crucial information to substantiate their claim. Sign up to their mailing list to receive a monthly summary of all the research Asylos publishes each month and find out how you can help.

Asylos also publishes reports with a wider scope, intended to fill critical gaps in the existing country of origin information.

Their second such report has just been published in May 2019: Albania: Trafficked Boys and Young Men.

Albanian children are one of the top five largest groups of unaccompanied asylum seekers in the UK, of whom not one received asylum in 2018. This report combines relevant and timely publicly available material with new information generated by interviewing a range of individuals with authoritative knowledge on the experiences of children trafficked from Albania.

The report was published jointly with the Asylum Research Centre and follows on from a major 2017 report on young men returned from the west to Afghanistan.

Thanks for reading. Do please give Asylos your support, and if you are a lawyer then do please use them!

“Asylos’s research has been extremely helpful in supporting asylum seekers prove the merits of their claims, in particular with complex cases or where there is no legal aid available… Asylos’s researchers have regional expertise and language skills and are thus in a great position to access information on a range of different cases.”

– Greta Nonni, South London Refugee Association