Repo for sharing, loading and analyzing Immigration and Refugee Board Refugee Appeal Division cases programmatically
Author: Sean Rehaag
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Dataset & Code to be cited as:
Sean Rehaag, "Refugee Appeal Division Bulk Decisions Dataset" (2023, updated 2025), online: Refugee Law Laboratory <https://github.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/rad_bulk_data>.
To load data, see load_and_analyze_rad_cases.ipynb
Notes:
(1) Data Source: Immigration and Refugee Board. In the Fall of 2022, the IRB added the Refugee Law Laboratory to their email distribution list for legal publishers of RAD decisions. The RLL therefore receives new RAD cases as they are released for publication by the IRB. Also, in the fall of 2022 the Immigration and Refugee Board provided the RLL with a full backlog of approximately 116k published decisions from all divisions (RAD, RPD, ID, IAD).
(2) Unofficial Data: The data are unofficial reproductions. For official versions, please contact the Immigration and Refugee Board.
(3) Non-Affiliation / Endorsement: The data has been collected and reproduced without any affiliation or endorsement from the Immigration and Refugee Board.
(4) Upstream licensing: Users must comply with upstream licenses.
(5) Accuracy: Data was collected and processed programmatically for the purposes of academic research. While we make best efforts to ensure accuracy, data gathering of this kind inevitably involves errors. As such the data should be viewed as preliminary information aimed to prompt further research and discussion, rather than as definitive information.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Rafael Dolores for coding the parsing scripts.
Additional note: In 2025, the Refugee Law Laboratory transferred the project of hosting Canadian Legal Data to the Access to Algorithmic Justice project. The RLL continues to provide RAD data to A2AJ, but for details about access please see: https://github.com/a2aj-ca/canadian-legal-data