Istanbul / TURKIYE
[email protected]
444 2 157
Türkçe TURKISH
English ENGLISH

About Us


About Us

IRRA – the International Refugee Rights Association, established in Istanbul in 2013, is an independent civil society organisation working to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, to support their access to justice, and to enable them to live a life in keeping with human dignity.

Our Principles

  • We embrace the universality of human rights, human dignity, the rule of law and the prohibition of discrimination as the core principles of our work.

  • We work to prevent the protection risks and rights violations that arise in the context of migration and forced displacement, and to support access to rights, services and effective protection mechanisms; we monitor and document border and push-back practices within the framework of human rights and the principle of non-refoulement, and carry out evidence-based advocacy in this field.

Legal Support and Counselling

  • The foundation of our work is supporting access to justice through legal support and counselling.

  • We support refugees’, asylum seekers’ and migrants’ access to legal counselling and effective remedies, and we monitor legislation, policy and practice in the field of migration and asylum from a human rights perspective.

  • We identify recurring and structural problems encountered in individual cases and contribute to the development of lasting, rights-based solutions to them.

Our Areas of Work

  • Legal support and counselling.

  • Information provision and awareness-raising.

  • Identification of protection needs and referral to appropriate services.

  • Protection monitoring and evidence-based analysis.

  • Advocacy and policy recommendations.

  • Training and capacity development.

Impact, Training and Partnerships

  • We translate the findings from our fieldwork and legal work into evidence-based analysis, knowledge production and advocacy. We document rights violations, protection risks and the structural barriers encountered in accessing rights and services, and share our findings with relevant actors and the public through reports, analyses, briefing and policy notes. We contribute to carrying field-level knowledge and experience into policy and decision-making processes and to developing practices in line with human rights standards.

  • We regard the sharing of knowledge and experience as an important part of protecting rights and strengthening capacity in the field of protection. We run structured training and capacity-development programmes for lawyers, protection and civil society actors, academics, university students and volunteers, and contribute to the production of knowledge and expertise on the legal, social and humanitarian dimensions of migration and forced displacement through academic studies, analyses and publications.

  • Practices in Removal Centres and administrative detention processes constitute an important focus of our rights-based work. We carry out monitoring, knowledge and data production, and evidence-based advocacy aimed at protecting the rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in these processes, and we assess existing practices within the framework of national and international human rights standards.

  • We believe that rights must not only be recognised in legal texts but must also be accessible and effective in practice. To this end, we develop dialogue and cooperation with public institutions, professional associations, universities, civil society organisations, United Nations agencies and international networks. We carry our field and legal experience in Turkey to national and international human rights mechanisms, and we contribute to reflecting international human rights and refugee law standards in national policy and practice.

As IRRA, we approach migration not merely as a movement that needs to be managed, but as a human rights issue at the centre of which lie the person, their rights and human dignity. With our holistic approach — spanning from access to individual rights to the resolution of structural problems, and from field-level protection work to national and international advocacy — we work to strengthen a system in which rights are accessible and effective for everyone.