Political Asylum

In fall 1999, when the British media started a smear campaign against Rudolf, the nightmare of his wife became true Rudolf became fair game of British politics, media and the justice system.692 Had it been possible for his wife and his children until then to visit Rudolf frequently, this turned out to be extremely difficult ever after, since Rudolf left Europe in late 1999 and entered the USA, where he applied for Political Asylum in October 2000. Especially the abandoned father and his two children suffer terribly under this situation of being almost totally isolated from each other. 

The severe health effects of exposure to Polonium-210 became frontpage news in 2006 when former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko died. Litvinenko (44), who had sought political asylum in Great Britain in 2000, fell ill in November of 2006 and died several weeks later due to severe radiation poisoning. The source of the poisoning was a mystery and his death was investigated as a murder. 

Also in Chapter 1 we briefly mentioned the case of poisoning of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service, FSB and KGB, escaped prosecution in Russia and received political asylum in the United Kingdom. He suddenly fell ill in London on the 1 November 2006, was hospitalised, and died three weeks later, becoming the first confirmed victim of lethal polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. Traces of the polonium-210 were subsequently discovered at various locations in London visited by Mr Litvinenko as well as in Russia and on two British Airways flights. 

Shuman, A., and Bohmer, C. (2004) Representing Trauma Political Asylum Narrative. Journal of American Folklore 117(466) 394-414. 

Keywords forced migration. West Africa, Economic Community of West African States, European Union, immigration, displacement, mixed migration, politics, asylum... 

Looking back at an earlier era s race consciousness from the vantage point of the 1940s, Ruth Benedict wrote, In all the American racist volumes there was an immediate political objective revision of the immigration laws. The American temper had changed since the days when our motto was No distinction of race, creed, or color and we offered an asylum for the oppressed. 91 And when, we ought to ask, was thatf At the time that... 

T. Szasz, Ideology and Insanity (Garden City, N.Y. Anchot Books, 1970) R. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York Ballantine Books, 1967) E. Goffman, Asylums Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (Garden City, N.Y Doubleday Anchot, 1961). 

The other political objective of 20th-century mental health policy was deinstitutionalisation. The asylums, which had formed the 19th century s segregational response to madness, were costly to run and... 

Bedazzled by the myth of mental illness and seduced by psychiatry s usefulness for disposing of unwanted persons, the modern mind recoils from confronting the irreconcilable conflict between the political ideals of a free society and the coercive practices of psychiatry. Let us keep in mind that psychiatry began as a statist enterprise the insane asylum was a public institution, supported by the state and operated by employees of the state. The main impetus for converting private health into public health came, and continues to come, from psychiatrists. 

Keywords refugees, forced migration, political theory, ethics, displacement, citizenship, nationality, power, asylum, states... 

Gibney, M.J. (2004) The Ethics and Politics of Asylum. Cambridge Cambridge University Press. 

Souter, J. (2013) Towards a Theory of Asylum as Reparation for Past Injustice. Political Studies. <>. 

Milner, J. (2009) Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa. Basingstoke Palgrave Macmillan. 

---