ABSTRACT
In exploring the development of both asylum and refugee law, it has been evident that they each spring from very different sources and are governed by different sets of norms. A number of questions flow from the investigation: is asylum, as historically understood, any longer possible? What advantages, if any, would asylum today offer to the refugee in contrast to refugee law? Some of the answers to these questions are revealed in this part of the book: an exploration of the US Sanctuary Movement and the Sans-Papiers and their relationship to law. Here, we find attempted resurrections of the ancient practice of sanctuary, perhaps in their most sustained form in the Western world since the decline of Church sanctuary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While many criticisms can be made of the Sanctuary Movement and the Sans-Papiers in their limitations, and indeed the author explicitly makes many of these in this chapter, they demonstrate the potential to reconfigure asylum from the degraded experiences.
