the IHRA working definition in local government

IHRA adoptions

We dated each decision by a city or other local government on the working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) from the council's record where we found one, and from secondary sources where we did not.

We combined the decisions our searches found in council records with the lists of adoptions kept by three advocacy groups, the American Jewish Committee, the Combat Antisemitism Movement and the Campaign Against Antisemitism. Most rows come from those lists rather than from a council record, and the evidence column of each row states which source we used. Where two lists give different dates, we recorded both in the notes of the downloadable file. We drew a random sample of 60 rows dated from the lists and found a council record to compare for 16 of them: the council's date matched the list's to the day in 12 and to the month in 4. We could not check the rest, because the council's site blocked automated access or we found no record. In November 2026 we searched for the government's own record of each of the 523 local decisions taken from the lists, and found and read it for 441. For each of those decisions we list in the table the record, the decision it shows and the body that made it. The advocacy lists describe nearly all of these decisions as adoptions, while the councils' records show adoptions with the definition's examples and without them, adoptions with caveats, endorsements, proclamations, statements with no vote, and the definition placed inside an equality policy. The lists are incomplete, so the trend line shows when the recorded adoptions took place and does not count every local adoption. Where we know only the year of a decision, we placed it at 1 July of that year on the chart and the map and marked it in the table. Decisions with no known date appear in the table only.