RiMAP: AI virtual assistant on refugee law to support protection
Challenge
UNHCR’s Rights Mapping & Analysis Platform (RiMAP) is a global platform to record and analyze laws and policies driving, under a common analytical framework, access to rights for refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced and stateless persons. UNHCR’s protection staff need support in structuring the analysis of this high volume of legal data.
Solution
Explore the potential of providing UNHCR staff with an ‘AI co-pilot’ (virtual assistant) for law and policy analysis to assist faster research, understanding, and presentation of access to rights of forcibly displaced and stateless populations.
Impact
UNHCR colleagues at country, regional bureaux, and headquarters level have readily accessible and updated legal information regarding the rights of the people UNHCR works with and for, which will support policy dialogues and improve protection outcomes.
Project impact
Other information
UNHCR legal officers spend significant time manually searching national legislation across more than 200 countries to conduct legal analysis and feed the global UNHCR Rights Mapping and Analysis (RIMAP) platform. Funded by the Data Innovation Fund and developed in academic partnership with the University of Lausanne and the University of Zurich, the RIMAP Virtual Legal AI Assistant (VLA) uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation to deliver grounded answers with precise article-level citations across 1,424 legislation documents. This allows staff to ask legal questions in natural language and receive grounded answers with precise article-level citations, drawing on international, regional and national legislation generated from RefWorld and RIMAP.unhcr.org platforms combined. Find out more about this project by watching the video below.