825.00/365: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Chile ( Collier )
4. Supplementing the Department’s telegram No. 3 of January 26, 4 p.m. the following is the Department’s position with regard to asylum:
The Government of the United States respects the principle that a sovereign state enjoys the exclusive right to control and administer justice within its territory, and hence that it should not be resisted or thwarted by an American diplomatic officer when its authorities demand the surrender for purposes of prosecution of any person charged with crime who is not, by reason of some connection with the mission, to be deemed exempt from the local jurisdiction. Because the granting of shelter is oftentimes, if not commonly, accorded with a view to withholding an individual from that jurisdiction such action cannot be regarded with favor, save under very exceptional circumstances. As Secretary Root declared in a note to the American Minister to Haiti on April 11, 1908, “instructions have made it clear that this Government does not recognize a [the] so-called right of asylum” ( Foreign Relations, 1908, 435). The Department of State does not countenance “any attempt knowingly to harbor offenders against the laws from the pursuit of the legitimate agents of justice.”
While the Department has at times approved of the yielding by an American diplomatic officer of temporary shelter to an individual when the safety of his life was threatened as by mob violence in a country where conditions of great disorder prevailed, the significance of such an exceptional situation should not be misconstrued. It is based on the theory that disorderly conditions productive of mob violence, for example, have so impaired the power or disposition of local authorities to administer justice as to render inapplicable for the time being the principle above set forth. An American diplomatic officer must therefore exercise utmost discretion in determining whether such extraordinary conditions exist and continue to exist throughout the period of which shelter is sought or granted; or whether on the contrary any shelter which he is asked to accord is designed rather to thwart the common exercise of jurisdiction by the territorial sovereign. That a refugee should be sought by his political enemies for an essentially political offense would not necessarily bring the case within the exception noted, at least if such an offense were one made punishable by the local law, and if there was no reason to believe that the rights accorded an accused person for purposes of defense would not be respected.
[Page 585]An individual fleeing before a mob might be given temporary refuge in an American mission, if he entered the same in the course of flight, until the mob dispersed or until the mission could turn him over to the authorities of the country, de facto or otherwise, who were in a position to protect him from similar out-breaks of mob violence. The fact that a person already in the custody of the local authorities is in danger of mob violence would not suffice to justify intervention by American diplomatic officers. Should the individual break away from the authorities in the face of a mob attack and seek refuge in an American mission he might be given refuge until the authorities were again in a position to resume custody of the fugitive and accord him protection from mob violence.
The foregoing principles will guide you hereafter in the relevant situations with which you may be confronted.