ABSTRACT
This chapter examines debates on asylum in a more historical framework by looking at the recognition of asylum as a right in an international and a national setting during the late 1940s. Scholars have examined right of asylum in the framework of international law and in various national contexts. The chapter contributes to the discussion by providing an analysis of empirical political debates from a conceptual perspective. These debates resulted in different legal conceptions and codifications which continue to resonate in the understandings of asylum, its scope and limits, today. The first formulates asylum as a state prerogative, as a right of the state, whereas the latter recognises it as a fundamental constitutional human right of the individual. The chapter looks at the arguments and conceptual controversies behind the creation of these two rights, including the disagreement over their meaning and content, and over the corresponding duties of the states.
