Nordic Refugee Determination: Advancing Data Science in Migration Law (NordASIL)

NordASIL’s primary aim is to create scientific breakthroughs in the form of interdisciplinary methods and theory into how different sites of national adjudication absorb, interact and produce standards and interpretations of asylum law and medical evidence. NordASIL’s secondary aim is to provide new insights for civil society and decision-makers by creating a stronger platform for research-based policy-making and provide critical reflections on emerging digitalization processes in asylum administrations.

To understand the process of asylum decision-making and its outcomes, the project relies on an integrated approach that combines skills and empirical materials from different disciplines, e.g. legal case files, large-scale databases and medical reports. NordASIL moreover builds on a combination of legal, social science and computational methods to advance a research agenda capable of overcoming the fragmentation and shortcomings identified by existing research in this field. 

The research strategy builds on a dialectical approach that combines computational analysis with qualitative methods from each discipline. Computational analysis is used to assess the relative importance of different independent variables and develop predictive models of asylum outcomes. Qualitative analysis of legal documents and medical evidence is used to verify and explain results, and participatory methods to enable grounded sense-making of data among practitioners. The combination of computational and qualitative methods further enables an interdisciplinary process of data interrogation. This includes critically investigating both our own and public data practices and raising questions about bias, data deficits, exclusion, equity and risks

NordASIL is led by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (UCPH-Law) in collaboration with the following co-PIs: Anna Sarkadi (UU-Medicine), Rebecca Stern (UU-Law), Cecilia Bailliet (UiO-Law), Malcolm Langford (UiO-Law) and Thomas Hildebrandt (UCPH-DIKU).

The project will be implemented as an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Faculty of Law and the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo (Norway) and the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Law, University of Uppsala (Sweden).

The project further engages with key stakeholders in the field of Nordic asylum law, including Danish Refugee Council, Danish Refugee Appeals Board, Norwegian Orgnisation for Asylum Seekers, Swedish Refugee Law Center and UNHCR Northern Europe.