International Instruments and Documents

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In addition to the Refugee Convention and Protocol there are a number of other relevant human rights treaties, declarations, and other instruments related to refugee law. For a good explanation of international documents and bodies, see Refugee Protection: A Guide to International Refugee Law.

• UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Provides the text of the convention and protocol, status information, reservations and declarations, handbooks, and ExCom documents, and Travaux préparatoires.
  • Legal Protection Pages (under Protecting Refugees)
  • Research/Evaluation Pages.
    • Legal Information. Provides access to refugee policy documents, national legislation, international instruments, both universal and regional.
    • Country of Origin Information. Access to UNHCR documents, governmental documents, NGO reports.
  • REFWORLD CD-ROM. Contains international law, national legislation, and national case law. See Marci for access to this CD-ROM.
• UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Web Site. Provides the texts of primary human rights instruments, including instruments related to Nationality, statelessness, asylum and refugees.
• UN Treaty Collection (UCB only). Access to the text of many treaties published in UNTS, plus status and ratification information.
• EISIL (Electronic Information System for International Law). See human rights category which provides links to the text of primary human rights and related instruments, plus usable citations, and links to other relevant sites.
• University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. A large collection of human rights instruments and documents.
• International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The ICRC provides access to the Geneva conventions, a humanitarian law treaties database, a national legislation database, and more information.
  • IHL Database. A large collection of international humanitarian law treaties and conventions, plus commentary.
  • National Implementation Database. A good collection of national legislation relating to humanitarian law.

Prepared by Marci Hoffman, International and Foreign Law Librarian, UC Berkeley Law Library, January 2006.