Access to Legal Information and Refugee Empowerment: Experimental Evidence from Greece

Can legal empowerment support forcibly displaced people facing high levels of violence and limited incentives to report? We study engagement with legal information and its downstream impact using a randomized encouragement design with 1,707 refugees and asylum seekers in Greece. At baseline, nearly half of participants were unaware of where to seek help after experiencing violence. We randomly encouraged access to either generic legal information via a website, personalized legal information delivered through WhatsApp, or a control condition. Take-up was higher for generic than personalized information. Relative to the control group, personalized information significantly improved knowledge of exploitation and confidence in responding to violence three months later, whereas effects of generic information were smaller and statistically insignificant. We find no detectable effects on more distant outcomes, including mental healthand integration. Online trace data suggests that personalized conversations provide tailored guidance and referrals, highlighting a trade-off between scalability and effectiveness.