A Return to “Diplomatic Asylum”?
by Peter
Spiro May 1, 2012
Uri
Feldman and Josh Keating have this excellent piece now up
over at Foreign Policy on the history and mechanics of diplomatic asylum, as
now possibly playing out in the case of Chen Guangcheng.
This in the wake of Wang Lijun, who
got the Bo Xilai ball rolling and spent 30 hours holed up in the US consulate
in Chengdu. In a different register — because it involved a US citizen — Sam LaHood sought refuge in the US embassy Cairo for
four weeks against criminal charges relating to the NGO activities in Egypt
before being allowed to leave the country.
I
had always thought “diplomatic asylum” something of a misnomer, as often paired
with the common misunderstanding that embassy premises are extraterritorial (as
in, that the US embassy in Beijing counts as US territory, which in fact it
doesn’t). Turns out that the term has some historical traction, even
though the its operation now appears to turn on the inviolability of diplomatic
premises under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and not any
distinctive legal doctrine. Much of that history played out in Latin
America, where the revolutionary era of a century ago led to multiple accords
regularizing the practice. Feldman and Keating unearthed this definitive, lengthy 1975 report of the UN
Secretary General on the subject, which makes for pretty
interesting reading.
Are
we about to see more of the same? I doubt it. The 1975 report
documents what was a common practice. As the FP notes, diplomatic asylum
was also a recurrent thorn on the East Bloc’s side during the Cold War.
Today it just doesn’t seem that useful a tool; there is too much at stake
in relations with countries like China, and human rights disputes are no doubt
better managed without the high-theater that comes with these cases.
Gimme
Shelter
BY
URI FRIEDMAN AND JOSHUA KEATING | APRIL 30, 2012
So,
how do you take refuge in an embassy,
anyway?
What
this means in practice is that once someone seeks refuge in an embassy, the foreign government often enters
into negotiations with the host government about the
fugitive's fate. In February,
when the Chinese official Wang Lijun turned up at
the American consulate in Chengdu seeking asylum and accusing Chinese leader Bo
Xilai of corruption, he was eventually transferred to Chinese custody and has not been heard from since.
This time around, it's unclear whether
Chen Guangcheng, if he is indeed with American diplomats, is seeking asylum in
the United States or simply a temporary safe haven from which to condemn his
captors and pressure Beijing to guarantee his safety. Neither goal is assured and, either way, the
episode will be a critical test for U.S.-Chinese relations.
During
the Cold War, embassy defections played a critical role in diplomacy. Some of
the defectors were spies such as KGB Maj. Vasili Mitrokhin, who walked into the U.S.
embassy in Riga as the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1992,
bringing with him a treasure trove of intelligence secrets. In 1953, when the leftist government of
Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup, Ernesto
"Che" Guevara, who had ties to the regime, took refuge in
the Argentine embassy before securing passage to Mexico, where he would
eventually meet up with Fidel Castro.
On
April 5, 1980, 750 Cubans gathered at the Peruvian embassy in Havana demanding political
asylum. The next day, their numbers had swelled to 10,000.
Recognizing the scale of the political crisis, the Castro regime authorized a
boatlift of thousands of asylum seekers to the United States and other Latin
American countries. And 1989 saw what became known as the "Prague Embassy
Crisis," as hundreds of East
Germans began jumping the walls into the
West German embassy in Prague, demanding asylum. A tent city was set up in the
embassy's courtyard to accommodate the asylum seekers, and eventually more than
20,000 people are thought to have made it to West Germany this way. Just 40
days after the West German government granted the Prague refugees asylum, the
Berlin Wall fell.
For
the last 50 years, foreign embassies in Beijing have been the most popular
destination for North Korean refugees seeking to flee to South
Korea or the west. In one of the largest defections, 25 asylum-seekers stormed their way
into the Spanish embassy in 2002.
While
governments have generally abided by the terms of the Vienna Convention, they have found ways to bend the
rules at times. When ousted Panamanian
leader Manuel Noriega took refuge from
U.S. troops at the Vatican embassy in Managua in 1990, the Americans blasted
rock music -- including Guns'n'Roses -- at the compound in an effort to force
him out. Perhaps sick of the racket themselves, Vatican officials eventually
gave Noriega his marching orders.
Question of Diplomatic Asylum : Report
of the Secretary-General
PART
II. REPORT OF THE
SECRETARY-GENERAL PREPARED PURSUANT TO OPERATIVE PARAGRAPH 2 OF GENERAL
ASSEMBLY RESOLUTION 3321 (XXIX)
1. Terminology
1. The term "diplomatic asylum" in the broad sense is used to denote
asylum granted by a State outside its
territory, particularly in its diplomatic missions (diplomatic
asylum in the strict sense), in its consulates, on board its ships in the
territorial waters of another State (naval asylum), and also on board its
aircraft and of its military or para-military installations in foreign
territory. The other form of asylum granted to individuals, namely, that which
is granted by the State within its
borders, is generally given the name "territorial asylum".
The terminology employed in this entire field lacks uniformity.
