Guide and glossary
CPIN Explorer · how to use it
Guide
How to find a country’s notes, read the current guidance, see what changed between editions and cite a passage. The glossary below explains the terms.
What this is
CPIN stands for Country Policy and Information Note: the Home Office’s guidance for its decision makers on asylum and human rights claims from one country. The notes are written by its Country Policy and Information Team (CPIT) and published on GOV.UK. This site keeps a copy of every note, verbatim (word for word), and of every earlier edition it has seen. It is an independent mirror, not a Home Office service: always check the current edition on GOV.UK.
Country Policy and Information Note
About CPINs: the Home Office’s purpose, methodology and use →
Find a country
The home page is a globe with a dot for each country that has notes. The dots are the targets: click or tap one, and that country’s reports open beside the globe (below it on a phone). Blue dots are countries updated in the last 30 days. Every country is also in the All countries list, and you can type its name in the search box.
Updated in the last 30 daysOther countriesDrag to turn · Click a country
Read the latest guidance
Each report on a country’s page has a Read the latest guidance button. It opens the current edition laid out for reading, with its contents, numbered paragraphs and Find in this report in the header. The words are the Home Office’s, unchanged. A line under the title gives the version, the date it was published, and links to the same note and its PDF on GOV.UK.
See what changed
Above the text, History shows every edition held on a timeline. Drag the handle, or click any point on the timeline, to move through them: the text below becomes the report as it stood on that date. Each edition is captioned with the Home Office’s own sentence on what changed (its ‘Changes from last version’), word for word. Anything this site worked out itself, such as how many words were added and removed, is labelled Computed.
Updated COI and Assessment.
ComputedRewritten · about 17% of the earlier wording kept · +35,049 −26,201 words
Compare two editions
Turn on Show changes to see an edition compared with the one before: inserted words are underlined, deleted words struck through. Choose Inline to read the marks in the text, or Side-by-side (on a wider screen) to see the two editions next to each other; the Old and New handles on the timeline compare any two. Rewritten means an edition keeps under a quarter of the earlier wording, so marks would cover almost everything. Those are offered side by side without marks, with the marked comparison one click away.
Search
There is one search box, in the header of the home page. As you type it lists countries, then reports grouped by subject, then passages from the text of the reports and any matching glossary term. The All passages → link under them opens the full list, which you can narrow by kind of report and by country. To search within one country, open it and use the box above its reports.
Humanitarian situation9 countries · 10 reports
All 611 passages →Save and cite
In a report, select any passage and a small bar appears with its paragraph number. Save highlight keeps the passage in this browser, with a citation to the edition you read it in and the sources its footnotes cite. Choose Full (OSCOLA) or Short (tribunal) for the citation, and Copy citation to paste it into your own document. The Saved page lists everything you have kept and exports it to Word.
The citation stays with the edition you saved from. If the words remain in the current edition, a note gives its version and paragraph number. Choose Cite the current edition instead to move the citation there; it never changes automatically.
How current it is
The home page shows Accurate as of and a time: when this site last confirmed that GOV.UK had published nothing newer. Select that line, or Check for changes beside it, to ask GOV.UK again and see what was compared. A sync is scheduled every day to copy anything new, and one every week to re-read every note in full, which catches edits made without a new date. All times are UK time.
Where earlier editions come from
GOV.UK shows only the current edition of each note; earlier editions here are either ones this site copied at the time, or archived copies recovered from the Internet Archive, the National Archives or document repositories, linked to their source and labelled with an archive capture date where known. Recovered PDF editions can be read and compared where their text can be extracted; they are marked From the PDF and linked to the source PDF. Where GOV.UK recorded an update but no copy of that edition was captured, the timeline marks the date Not held and shows the edition then in force. A PDF whose text is not held is marked PDF only, with the PDF linked, and an update that took the report down is marked Removed.
Sources and dead links
The notes cite thousands of web pages, and some have since moved or gone. This site tests each cited link: one that now leads elsewhere is tagged Moved, and one that no longer works is tagged Dead, with the Internet Archive’s copy beside it where there is one. Some sites refuse automated checks; their links are tagged Can’t verify. The Sources button under a report’s title gives the counts and steps to the next dead link.
Report a bug
If something looks wrong on this site, use Report a bug at the foot of any page. It opens an email to the site’s owner with the page address and your browser already filled in; nothing is sent until you send it. A mistake in the wording of a note is the Home Office’s own: the text here is copied, never corrected.
What the words mean
Glossary
These explanations are this site’s own. They are not Home Office text, and they are not legal advice.