“The Duty and the Accepted Custom”: Foundations of the Right of Asylum in Mexico during the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, the colonial tradition of granting asylum in sacred places merged with the emerging political sensitivity of humani­tarianism to face the challenges posed by the transnational circulation of persecuted people and political criminals. The aim of this work is to explain how this unique combination of elements, derived from diffe­rent fields of reference, supported the granting of political asylum in Mexico before the first attempts of its codification at the end of the nineteenth century. To achieve this objective, we use files from the Ar­chive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, as well as the main international law treaties that circulated in Latin America during the period. The importance of this research lies in the fact that the question of the argumentative tools of political asylum in a period prior to codifi­cation helps us understand not only the configuration of the legal limits of political asylum in relation to international law, but also the origins of discretion, as a tool for granting asylum to this day.