Empowering Refugee Claimants and their Lawyers: Using Machine Learning to Examine Decision-Making in Refugee Law

Our project aims at helping and supporting stakeholders in refugee status adjudications, such as lawyers, judges, governing bodies, and claimants, in order to make better decisions through data-driven intelligence and increase the understanding and transparency of the refugee application process for all involved parties. This PhD project has two primary objectives: (1) to retrieve past cases, and (2) to analyze legal decision-making processes on a dataset of Canadian cases. In this paper, we present the current state of our work, which includes a completed experiment on part (1) and ongoing efforts related to part (2). We believe that NLP-based solutions are well-suited to address these challenges, and we investigate the feasibility of automating all steps involved. In addition, we introduce a novel benchmark for future NLP research in refugee law. Our methodology aims to be inclusive to all end-users and stakeholders, with expected benefits including reduced time-to-decision, fairer and more transparent outcomes, and improved decision quality.