This guide provides research guidance and direct links to useful resources for doing research on country conditions for asylum cases.
To search library collections across the country, use:
To access SFPL's databases remotely, you must have an SFPL library card.
To find reports using Google, try adding type:.pdf to your Google search. For example, to find reports on domestic violence in Guatemala, search for:
Guatemala domestic violence type:.pdf
Sample search provided below
If no comprehensive database is available for your jurisdiction, use secondary sources such as books, journal articles, reports, or the Foreign Law Guide to identify a citation (such as the decreto number) for the law you need. Then search for the law online by Googling the citation.
If you don't speak the language of the website you're using, try viewing the site in the Google Chrome browser. Just right-click on the page and select "Translate to English" from the drop-down menu. If you need a rough translation of a document such as statute or court judgment, upload the document or copy and paste the text into Google Translate,
If you don't speak the language of the website you're using, try viewing the site in the Google Chrome browser. Just right-click on the page and select "Translate to English" from the drop-down menu. If you need a rough translation of a document such as statute or court judgment, upload the document or copy and paste the text into Google Translate,
Mexican Law for the American Lawyer by If you need to find documents providing evidence of "Gangs targeting gay/queer people in Mexico" and/or "the Zetas Cartel targeting gay/queer people in Mexico" you should run searches in all of the sources listed below, using search strings like:
"Gangs targeting gay/queer people in Mexico" and/or "the Zetas Cartel targeting gay/queer people in Mexico."
(Gang OR violence OR "Zetas Cartel") AND (gay OR queer OR lesbian OR trans OR "gender nonconforming") AND Mexico
Each database will require a different search query because databases have different search functionality. You can reach out to the library for more guidance on how to run these searches in the databases listed below. It may also be useful to run a simpler version of this search on various websites, using the Google Advanced Search functionality to limit the search to a specific database or filetype. See examples of this below.
You can run a similar search in any of the sources linked to on this page. You may need to run the searches in Spanish. See below for sample searches.
