Refugee claimants and their lawyers will be barred from using artificial intelligence to write the personal narratives at the centre of their cases when a new practice notice from the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada comes into force Sept. 7.
The notice was signed July 10 by IRB chairperson Manon Brassard. It applies to all four divisions of the board, and, by its own definition, to every party who communicates with the IRB, including claimants who have no lawyer. It sets out what people may do with AI, what they must declare, and what happens if they get it wrong.
The firmest line in the document is also the narrowest. Parties “must not use AI to generate or materially change content that reports or reflects a person’s evidence,” the notice says, listing basis of claim narratives, affidavits and witness statements as examples. Using an AI tool to rewrite a person’s story is prohibited, as is creating or altering photographs, videos, screenshots or other corroborative evidence. Spellcheck, grammar correction and formatting help remain allowed, provided those tools do not generate the evidence or make material changes to it.
Where AI is permitted, it has to be declared in the document itself, using wording the notice supplies: that AI was used to create or materially change text, and that all AI-generated content and the authenticity of any cited case law has been reviewed and verified by a named person. The notice also tells parties not to pad submissions with AI-generated material unrelated to the facts of their case, adding that “longer submissions are not better submissions,” and citing a 2025 Federal Court decision, Messa v. Canada, on that point.
One requirement in the notice has drawn almost no attention and will reach further than the rest. Use of AI for transcription or translation “must always be disclosed.” The board’s rules already require translated documents to carry a declaration from a human translator, and that translator must now declare whenever AI was used to assist. For a claimant who does not read or write English or French, translation is not an optional convenience. It is how the file exists at all. A person who ran their own account through a free machine translation tool, or asked a family member who did, is inside a rule most will never hear about before their hearing.
The consequences are steeper here than in most tribunals. The notice says the IRB may refuse to accept a document, report counsel to their professional regulator, restrict or prohibit counsel from appearing, or “draw negative inferences about the credibility of the evidence.” In refugee determination, credibility is frequently the whole case. Claimants often arrive without documents from the country they fled, and their own sworn account is the primary evidence a member weighs. A credibility finding triggered by an undeclared AI edit is not a procedural setback. It can be the reason a claim fails.
The board has reason to act. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the IRB have both detected AI being used to insert fake or inaccurate information into applications, The Globe and Mail reported, including references to court decisions that do not exist. The IRB told the newspaper that memoranda of appeal are getting longer without getting stronger. Where misrepresentation is confirmed, a foreign national can face a five-year ban from entering Canada.
What the notice does not do is define where assistance ends and material change begins. Fixing a verb tense is plainly allowed. Asking a chatbot to make a paragraph clearer, in a story about torture recounted in a second language, sits somewhere the document does not mark.
Scale makes that ambiguity expensive. The IRB’s own departmental plan describes opening a fiscal year with roughly 170,000 refugee claims ready for adjudication against targeted annual finalizations of up to 85,000, about two years of work, while the board pursues efficiency by “leveraging technology” in its own operations. Claimants now face a documented standard for their use of these tools. The board has published no equivalent notice describing its own.
via The Globe and Mail. Primary source: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, “Practice notice: Use of artificial intelligence in IRB proceedings”.
