From Madrid to Quito and Mexico City, passing through Caracas, the right to asylum is in danger

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 24/09/2024

In April of this year, the world was shocked by the violent raid by law enforcement in the Mexican embassy in Ecuador. The operation was aimed at arresting and imprisoning Jorge Glas, former Vice President of Ecuador and convicted of corruption twice. Mexico condemned the act and was supported by most Latin American countries and the United States. Ecuador, however, rightly argued that Glas was not eligible for asylum since he was involved in the crime of corruption, which is a criminal offense. And from the strict point of view of justice, Ecuador was and is completely right: Glas is a common criminal, not a politically persecuted person. The Inter-American Convention on the Right of Asylum, which was the legal instrument invoked by Mexico, among others, clearly establishes that asylum status is granted to persons who are being persecuted for their ideas, political activism or opinions. Therefore, recognition of political refugee status and the issuance of a safe conduct for him to leave Ecuadorian territory for Mexico were not appropriate. However, the forced entry of the Mexican embassy is an act that violates another international instrument: the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which recognizes diplomatic headquarters as part of the territory of the country they represent. If there were a regional organization in the Americas with the capacity to resolve conflicts and aggregate interests, both nations would have been subject to sanctions or admonitions since Mexico violated the principle of asylum and Ecuador the principle of the inviolability of diplomatic headquarters.

More recently, we have witnessed another incident that affects the right to asylum. The winner of the presidential elections held on July 28 in Venezuela took refuge in the Spanish embassy in Caracas. Faced with the refusal of the Caracas regime to acknowledge its defeat and the launching of a wave of persecution against Gonzalez Urrutia's supporters, he decided to seek refuge. He came from the Dutch embassy, which had originally processed his refugee status in the European space. Gonzalez Urrutia, however, wanted to move to Spain. And he moved from the Dutch embassy to the Spanish one. Events took place in the Spanish embassy that contradict the principle of asylum. Among them was allowing entry to the head of the security forces in charge of imprisoning and torturing political dissidents. The doors were also opened to the President of the fraudulently elected National Assembly and to the Executive Vice President of the regime. These visits, taken together and individually, constitute a series of intimidations against a political refugee that do not fit within an asylum status. Therefore, it will be necessary to decipher for the future what Spain, as a member of the European Union, considers the protections granted by the right to asylum and to compare this interpretation with international conventions and the opinions of the rest of the members of the Union.

For observers without internal ties to the Spanish government, the conduct of this nation and the performance of its diplomats exhibits important innovations in the matter of political asylum that would be interesting to study. Because we assume that Spain acted in the Gonzalez Urrutia case taking into consideration only the legal-diplomatic aspects of the matter. And we assume that this conduct would not be linked to the meeting held in the days following the event between the president of the Bolivarian regime Nicolas Maduro and Jose Carlos de Vicente y Bravo and Luis Garcia Sanchez, both senior executives of Repsol.

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