In an asylum claim, a human rights and in some types of immigration applications, you may need to provide objective evidence about your country of origin (or country of normal residence).
In an asylum claim, you may need to need to provide evidence about the situation in your country of origin – in general, or for a particular group of people in your country – in addition to the information you give in your asylum interview and any documents or evidence that are directly about you.
In a human rights claim or some other kinds of immigration applications, you may need to show that certain services, support networks or other things you need so that your human rights aren’t breach aren’t available to you in your country, therefore you and/or your family members need to be granted the right to stay in the UK.
Read this page to find out what objective country of origin information is. You can also find what is considered to be trusted, good information. On this page, you can find lists of websites where you can find this information, categorised by themes that are common in asylum and immigration applications.
What is good objective evidence?
Objective evidence is evidence about your country of origin, or particular people in your country, that isn’t based on what you or people you know personally say is the situation. It is evidence from independent, trusted sources such as human rights organisations or well-known and respected media networks.
Country of origin information can also be found in the Home Office’s own country guidance documents. There are also “country guidance cases”, which are asylum appeals chosen by the immigration tribunal to give legal guidance for a particular country, or a particular group of people in a particular country. This page does not go into detail about Home Office guidance or country guidances cases. You can find information about these in our guide here.
This page focuses on human rights reports and trusted journalism.
It is common for information relevant to your case to be found in ‘interest-group’ media sources, such as a political opposition newspaper or a report by a community group affected by the issue. These sources are often not considered as independent and reliable by the courts.
Even if you use these less objective sources to first find the information, uou should try and find the same information in more mainstream media, for example newspapers with good world/foreign reporting such as The Guardian, Independent, or New York Times (or even better in a human rights report).
What to do with the information
Key sources of information
