THE RIGHT TO POLITICAL ASYLUM

 The right to asylum is the right of a state to grant or not to grant asylum to foreigners. However, in most European countries (France, Italy) this legal institution is correlated with the right of a person who is persecuted in his own country to obtain asylum in another country.

 The main characteristics of the institution of asylum law are: granting the state the right to grant asylum to foreigners who are persecuted for political or other reasons in their own country or another; the main task of granting asylum is to protect a person from persecution; occurrence of certain consequences both for the state and for the person who has received asylum.

Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 guarantees the right of the individual to ensure that everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right is also enshrined in a number of documents of international law. In particular, in accordance with paragraph 2 of the Declaration on Territorial Asylum of the Council of Europe, adopted on 01.01.1977, the member states of the Council of Europe have recognized their right to grant asylum to anyone who, having a well-founded experience, belonging to a certain social group, as well as any other person who, in their opinion, meets the conditions for asylum for humanitarian reasons.

 The right to asylum in Latin America is governed by the Havana Asylum Convention of 1928 and the Caracas Convention on Territorial Asylum of 1954.

It should be noted that there are two types of shelter:

• territorial;
• diplomatic (extraterritorial).

 The first type of asylum provides for granting any person the right to flee persecution, political in nature in the territory of another particular state; diplomatic (extraterritorial) is the provision by a state of a similar opportunity, but within the premises or territory of a consular post, diplomatic mission or on a foreign warship stationed in another country.

 The right to asylum in the Constitution of Ukraine is regulated by Part 2 of Article 26, which states that asylum seekers and foreigners are granted asylum in the manner prescribed by law. Similar provisions are set out in the constitutions of many countries. Usually, the constitutions of states enshrine the right to asylum, and the asylum procedure is regulated in detail by special laws. Unfortunately, in Ukraine the issue of political asylum is not settled, and asylum is usually granted by order of the president or another high-ranking official.

 The use of diplomatic asylum virtually ceased (with the exception of Latin America) after the adoption of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, which prohibits the use of diplomatic missions for purposes incompatible with its official functions. One of the latest cases of political asylum and at the same time "violation" of the Vienna Convention in this regard was the granting of asylum to Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Julian Assange, while in London, sought political asylum in Ecuador and hid in the Ecuadorian embassy in the UK for 7 years, until the next Ecuadorian government denied Assange asylum, but the British authorities promised not to extradite him to the United States. death penalty.

 A striking example of granting territorial asylum is the case of Joseph Stalin's daughter, who lost her rights in the Soviet Union after her father's death. Svetlana Stalin was allowed to leave the country in 1967 to transfer the ashes of her Indian partner to India, where she sought asylum at the US Embassy. The United States sent a CIA agent to help transport Stalin to the United States. In the United States, she burned her passport, convicted her father and the Soviet Union, and changed her name to Lana Peters after marrying an American architect. In 1984, she went to Russia to visit her son, whom she had left when she escaped, and once announced that she would stay and returned to citizenship. Two years later, she returned to the United States and remained there until her death in 2011.