International Protection in Cases with a Political Element
This report provides a systematic analysis of the architecture of international legal protection in cases where criminal prosecution is intertwined with a political, repressive, or quasi-political context. It examines the key layers of protection: asylum and international protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention and updated EU legislation (Regulation 2024/1347 and 2024/1348), the principle of non-refoulement as a universal barrier against transferring a person to a dangerous jurisdiction, and the UN system’s mechanisms — individual communications to treaty bodies (Committee against Torture, Human Rights Committee), urgent appeals through the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), and the Human Rights Council complaint procedure. The author demonstrates why effective protection in politically sensitive cases cannot rely on a single mechanism but requires a multi-layered strategy in which asylum, anti-refoulement safeguards, treaty bodies, Special Procedures, and the WGAD operate in parallel, compensating for each other’s limitations.
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