Description: This is a bulk open-access dataset in JSON format with the full text of all Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) Refugee Appeal Division cases provided by the IRB to the Refugee Law Lab. The process through which data is collected and processed, as well as code snippets for loading the data, are available in a repository on the Refugee Law Lab Github.
Data: https://github.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/rad_bulk_data/blob/master/DATA/yearly
Code Repository: https://github.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/rad_bulk_data
Current Coverage: 2013-Present
Number of Decisions: ~27,000
Languages: English & French
Format: JSON, Parquet, Hugging Face Dataset
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Citation: Sean Rehaag, “RAD Bulk Decisions Dataset” (2023), online: Refugee Law Laboratory https://refugeelab.ca/bulk-data/rad
Programmatic Access in Python (JSON via GitHub):
import pandas as pd
import requests
import json
start_year = 2013 # First year of data sought (2013+)
end_year = 2023 # Last year of data sought (2023 -)
base_ulr = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Refugee-Law-Lab/rad_bulk_data/master/DATA/YEARLY/'
data results = []
for year in range(start_year, end_year+1):
url = base_ulr + f'{year}.json'
results.extend(requests.get(url).json())
df = pd.DataFrame(results)
df