The Rights of Asylum

The early modern period was a formative time for rights of asylum as older forms of sanctuary came to be replaced by new rules and practices. Various forms of sanctuary had already existed in the ancient world. Both ancient Greece and Rome knew ‘sacred and inviolable spaces’, often associated with particular gods, where the law did not hold and the persecuted were able to hide. In early Christianity too, sacred places of worship served as places of asylum – a concept that was carried over into the Middle Ages, where church sanctuary could protect an individual from the force of the law and thus contributed to establishing the Church as a separate jurisdiction. This competing jurisdiction came increasingly under attack with the Protestant Reformation, when secular rulers centralised power in their own hands and church sanctuary was successively restricted and finally abolished.