How to Make Sure You’re Not Inadvertently Using Country Conditions Info that Can Harm Your Client’s Case

🔭 I’ve seen immigration attorney clients inadvertently include country conditions information that could have harmed their asylum seeker client's case 😥

How does it happen? 🤔

It's not hard to see why. Country conditions information in support of an asylum case easily balloons to hundreds and hundreds of printed pages 📄 📄 📄

Some of the individual reports included can be 100+ pages long and packed with information, which isn't necessarily easy to digest - so more like linguistic far-too greasy-and-bland-bacon 🥓 than a hearty-and-delicious-salad 🥗

It's just too much to read carefully when you're always pressed on time.

And here’s where I’ve found it’s easy, a little too easy, to miss information that seemingly contradicts your client’s statements and claims for asylum.

For example, in one case I worked on, involving an persecution on account of gender + belonging to an ethnic group and, the attorney included a source which focused on gender:

✅ which supported the gender claim
❌ but partially contradicted the ethnicity claim (and this was kind of buried and totally easy to miss).

To avoid inconsistencies like these, I've developed 3️⃣ simple rules (that I follow in my own work):

1️⃣ If you’re pulling out a statement from a source that verifies your client’s claim, ensure there aren’t other statements that point to a contradicting conclusion (remember these can be buried in notes or an appendix!)

2️⃣ If you’re using a statement from one source, make sure that statement is consistent with statements in all your other sources.

3️⃣ Check if the information in the source is actually harmful – sometimes it isn’t!

This last rule maybe needs an example: in a LGBTQ+ case I worked on, one report stated that discrimination was widespread except in the applicant’s home region...

... ❗ but in the methodological note, which was buried at the end the study, the report stated that its results weren't generalizations, that it was severely limited in empirical scope, and that it doesn't preclude there being far more discrimination than found in the study.

➡ I’ve been doing this a long time and I follow a set of methodological tools and rules that I’ve developed, which reduces the time I have to spend doing this without losing any of the quality.

➡ If you start doing it, over time you’ll be able to do this faster, and eventually stop worrying whether you may have missed something in that one report that may hurt your client’s case.