Between 2006 and 2009, a yearly average of 29,924 refugee claimants were referred to the Immigration and Refugee Board. They arrived in Canada through various means, asking to stay. The Immigration and Refugee Board hears their cases and decides based on the merits of each case.

In essence, asylum seekers must produce evidence that returning to their home country would result in injury or death. After weighing the evidence, a board member decides whether that person can stay in Canada. This decision is reflected in the board's acceptance rate, the last column that appears in the table that you'll search.

The acceptance rate is calculated by dividing the number of refugee claimants accepted by the total number of cases the IRB has finalized from that country during the time period in question.

A CBC News analysis of the IRB's decision database demonstrates that the overall average acceptance rate has declined significantly over the years and, as of the end of June, stood at about 40 per cent for 2010. Still, individual countries such as Sri Lanka and Afghanistan continue to experience rates much higher than the average, although their rates have also been declining.

To produce this data, CBC News obtained a document from the IRB that contained the numbers for each country. After transferring the numbers from the PDF file (the IRB wouldn't provide the numbers in a database format) into Excel, CBC News calculated the acceptance rates for each country, ranked them in descending order and uploaded the results online into the searchable database before you. The data represents cases the IRB processed for the first two quarters of 2010, from Jan. 1 to June 30.

Click here to load this Caspio Online Database app.
  

How to use the table

The searchable database allows you to compare acceptance rates for various countries. To obtain the rates for all the countries, select the "Any" option in the "Country" and "Acceptance rate" sections, and then click on the "Search" button. You will obtain a table with nine columns of information that breaks down the claims from each country by a number of factors such as "Accepted," "Rejected" and "Withdrawn."

To obtain the "Acceptance rate," we divided the number of accepted cases — the second column — by the number of claims "Finalized" — column seven. You'll notice that the IRB processed very few requests for the top seven countries. Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Central African Republic, Niger, Papua New Guinea, Qatar and Singapore, all had acceptance rates of 100 per cent, in large part because they produced so few claimants.

Nevertheless, we have included them in this table to provide a full list of all the countries producing asylum seekers. But for the purpose of our analysis that produced the headline for our story, we only included those countries that had more than 10 claims finalized. This criterion puts Sri Lanka in the top 10 countries with the highest acceptance rates.

If you want to look for individual countries, you can make a choice from the list in the box beside the "Country" category. You can select more than one country by holding down the Control (on a Windows PC) or Command (on a Mac) key while clicking.

We plan to update the database once the new numbers arrive for this year's third quarter.