Our Refugee Legal Support Service (RLSS) corroborates immigration cases by providing documentation on country conditions to attorneys representing refugees and immigrants applying for:
- Asylum
- Convention Against Torture
- NACARA
- VAWA
- Cancellation of removal
- Suspension of deportation
- Withholding of removal
Packets are prepared by our staff in response to a flood of requests for documentation on a particular topic or are acquired for distribution from the INS. Packets are Usually sent within three days of receiving a request. Click here for a list of packet descriptions and their fees.
Client-Specific Searches
This is research conducted for a specific refugee, immigrant, or asylum-seeker at the request of his or her attorney for any country worldwide. Searches are scheduled 1-3 weeks from the date they are received in our office. This service includes 2-5 hours of research, organizing of documentation, photocopying and firstclass/priority mail. Extra charges apply for information sent via Federal Express. Click here for the request form and guidelines.
Questionnaire (Acrobat Reader plug-in required)
If you are an attorney who has used our services, please take a few minutes to print out this questionnaire and send it to us (click on contact us for our fax number and address). Your feedback is important. The answers you provide will help us determine the effectiveness of our services.
Women's Documentation Project
This project collects information relating to the human rights of women in countries throughout the world to document gender-based asylum and hardship claims for battered women. Click here for more information.
Fees
The Human Rights Documentation Exchange began serving indigent refugees in 1986 and is still committed to providing documentation at rates that both private and pro bono attorneys can afford. For this reason you will find our fees on a sliding scale.
- Pro Bono/non-profit rate: $50.00
- Low-fee rate: $100.00
- Private rate: $200.00
To provide pro bono and private attorneys with timely, accurate and quality documentation, we collect and disseminate information from the following sources:
- Our in-house library that contains thousands of books and reports plus hundreds of periodicals on refugee producing countries,
- U.S. State Department and other government documents including the Government Accounting Office and Master Exhibits produced by the Resource Information Center of the INS,
- Non-governmental and Intergovernmental reports including: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights Internet, SOS Torture, Organization of American States,
- A Broad collection of reports from country-of-origin human rights organizations,
- Thousand of news articles clipped from major news sources and organized in our in-house files,
- Packets Developed by HRDE staff covering specific topics on human rights and country conditions, and
- On-line resources such as LEXIS UNIVERSE, RefWorld produced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and our in-house full-text database.
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