I approach the topic of `searching for country information` from two different perspectives: a legal perspective and an information perspective. The legal perspective refers to the procedural obligation to properly investigate asylum applications. A proper investigation requires country information to be collected and made available to asylum request handlers. With the information perspective, I am interested in information behaviour. By information behaviour, I mean the set of search activities and the components that influence them. Search activities are all activities carried out by practitioners to obtain country information during the processing of an asylum request.
I divide my research into three parts: law, information and evaluation. The first part (law) includes an analysis of the legal framework. This includes a description of the systematics of the Procedures Directive focused on country information and a clarification of the requirement to properly examine applications. The second part (information) focuses on the practice of collecting and making available country information. Here, the focus is on the relationship between country information and handlers. To clarify this relationship, I analyse practitioners' information behaviour. This analysis consists of an exploratory literature review and a field study specifically on practitioners' search activities. The last and third part (evaluation) involves a comparison of the outcomes of the first part, the legal framework, with the outcomes of the second part, information behaviour. This comparison yields similarities and differences between the sound research requirement and country information search practice.