Discover the new Refworld © UNHCR/Inês Santos
6 February 2024
Refworld is the leading global law and policy database relating to refugees, internally displaced and stateless people. Developed by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, it provides free, easy, and speedy access to comprehensive, trusted, and high-quality information on legislation, case law, and UNHCR policy and guidance.
With English, Russian, and Spanish versions, Refworld comprises more than 100,000 documents in different languages and is designed to assist policy and lawmakers, asylum-decision makers, judiciary and legal practitioners, academics and researchers and UNHCR staff.
Refworld is an essential tool to advance UNHCR’s mandate – it shares key guidance, examples and best practices, supports the capacity development of people involved in asylum decision-making, and provides information that assists the implementation, strengthening, and mainstreaming of protection mechanisms.
To modernize the database and improve its usability to enable colleagues and external partners to more effectively find relevant policy and legal information that supports their work and improves the quality of asylum decisions globally, UNHCR revamped the database, which was launched on 6 February 2024.
Users will immediately notice the modern design and clearly defined scope and content ensuring that UNHCR’s policy and guidance can be found almost effortlessly. There are several ways to search and browse depending on the needs and queries of the user, including by means of enhanced filters. These improved accessibility features will make it much easier to find the document you are looking for amongst the legal and policy documents in more than 50 languages available on the English, Russian and Spanish sites. Despite these changes, users will be pleased to learn that some of Refworld’s highly valued features are still there and have been upgraded and restyled, including the ‘cite as’ function, as well as the thematic areas and the UNHCR protection manual.
UNHCR will continue to expand the collections and improve the usability of the database so as to ensure its accuracy and accessibility.
We hope you enjoy Refworld and look forward to receiving your feedback!
Recent Comments