Austrian Centre for Country of Origin and Asylum Research and Documentation - ACCORD
Human rights form a crucial aspect in procedures for international protection: Human rights violations force people to leave their countries of origin in order to find protection from persecution or war. A fair procedure to assess individuals' claims to international protection requires access to information and knowledge about the situation in the countries of origin.
Country of origin information is essential for fair asylum procedures
ACCORD provides independently and neutrally researched information on countries of origin of asylum seekers in order to contribute to fair and efficient procedures for determining international protection needs. See: Quality Standards and Principles for Researching and Using Country of Origin Information (COI).
ACCORD continuously documents human rights developments focusing on the criteria of the 1951 Refugee Convention and other legal instruments providing international protection. ACCORD uses publicly citable materials from a variety of sources: international and regional human rights organisations as well as governments, the UN, international and local media and online databases.
ACCORD offers research services (responses to case related queries, country reports, etc.), manages the COI portal ecoi.net and conducts COI Training.
Research services
ACCORD provides individual research on human rights, political and humanitarian situation in countries of origin of asylum seekers.
The research services are open to asylum lawyers, refugee counsels as well as persons deciding on claims for asylum and other forms of international protection in Austria and selected other countries.
The results of research conducted by ACCORD can be found on ecoi.net by clicking the following links:
www.ecoi.net is an online country of origin information system accessible publicly and free of cost. ecoi.net aims to contribute to fair and efficient refugee status determination procedures by securing easy and fast access to high-quality and up-to-date country of origin information (COI) for all actors involved in asylum cases.
ecoi.net gathers and processes publicly available country of origin information with a focus on the needs of asylum lawyers, refugee counsels and persons deciding on claims for asylum and other forms of international protection.
ecoi.net is committed to an impartial information policy and to the objective and neutral presentation of country of origin information.
High quality COI is a prerequisite for fair and efficient procedures for international protection. The knowledge and understanding of quality standards and practical research skills form the main content of COI training.
ACCORD provides COI training to eligibility officers, judges, lawyers, legal counsels and law students.
Training sessions are based on the training manual (available for download in multiple languages, see download area on the right) or the COI Module of the European Asylum Curriculum.
COI Training presents background information and practical exercises enabling persons working with COI to:
understand basic principles of the refugee status determination (RSD) procedure;
understand the role of COI in the context of RSD;
apply quality standards in COI research;
identify and select relevant and reliable sources and information;
ACCORD is co-funded by the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, UNHCR and various non-governmental organizations working in the field of asylum.
