About NDP Search

NDP Search is an independent, non-commercial research tool for the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada's National Documentation Packages (NDPs), the country-conditions evidence used in refugee hearings. It helps you find what is in an NDP: searches return short excerpts with pinpoint citations, and every excerpt links back to the original document on its publisher's website.

Why this exists

Refugee hearings decide whether someone can stay in Canada or must return to the place they fled. They are proceedings where the evidence can be a matter of life and death, yet that evidence is surprisingly hard to work with. The IRB's National Documentation Packages are the backbone of country-conditions evidence in nearly every claim, but they exist as long lists of links on a website: more than two hundred packages, each holding dozens or hundreds of documents, thousands of pages deep, scattered across publishers all over the world.

The packages are also replaced wholesale several times a year, with a difficult to follow record of what changed. A document you cited last month may have been updated, renumbered, or removed. There has been no practical way to find out what meaningfully changed short of reading both versions side by side.

There's a deeper problem, too. Refugee proceedings are private (for good reasons) but the shape that privacy has taken over time has created a serious structural information deficit. There is no body of published outcomes to learn from, so it is hard or impossible for practitioners and the public to know how the IRB tends to approach different kinds of claims, which evidence decision-makers rely on, or what adjudicative theories they need to answer. Many refugee claims are, consequently, prepared in the dark. And there is poor public visibility into the decisions of a system that plays such a significant role.

NDP Search is an attempt to close some of that gap with the public record we do have. It unifies the public sources — every NDP document, every version it can capture, and the published decisions that cite them — and gives them a modern research interface: full-text search with pinpoint citations, version-to-version comparison, and visibility into which evidence actually gets cited in decisions. None of this is secret information; it was always public. It was just unusable.

I'm a former refugee lawyer and adjudicator. I've used my experience of what matters in practice to design something on modern principles and technology. The fundamental goal is to improve access, transparency and fairness inside a really important public-information problem. I hope you find it useful.

A note of caution

This is an independent research project not associated with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. NDP Search is an experimental tool under active development. It can and does contain errors and limitations. Treat it as a way to find evidence, never as the evidence itself. AI-generated material (summaries, litigation themes) is labelled where it appears and can be wrong. Always verify against the original sources, which are linked from every document.