Hanna-Mari Kivistö, MA
PhD Candidate in Political Science
Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy
University of Jyväskylä
E-mail: hmkivist@yfi.jyu.fi
Postal address:
P.O. Box 35 (MaB)
FI-40014 University of Jyväskylä
Research interests
The politics of the right to asylum: the context of the 1949 Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany
My doctoral thesis focuses on the 1949 Basic Law (Grundgesetz) of the Federal Republic of Germany, concentrating especially on its article 16, which came to include the famous line “Politisch Verfolgte genießen Asylrecht” and thus, leading to the in several ways unique notion of asylum as an individual right.
As primary material for my study I analyze the debates of the Parliamentary Council (Parlamentarischer Rat) preceding the Basic Law. My starting point is, that it was in a parliamentary forum where the individual right to asylum was created, and I am thus interested in the political struggles for its formulation. I shall also emphasize the provision as a strong response to the post war politico-historical conditions, being to the core shaped by the past experiences. As a tool to approach and thematize this I shall employ the categories ‘experience’ and ‘expectation’ by Reinhart Koselleck.
As the years 1948-49 came to be highly important period of time in regard to the development of international law, the German context cannot and should not be studied separately from it. My idea is rather to connect the Parliamentary Council debates to a broader context of post World War II human rights debates, especially to the formation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the “Magna Carta of refugees”, the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) and thus also study the interplay between these different national and international legal instruments, all of which were formulated in a rather short time frame in relation to each other. The 1949 Basic Law should also be understood and considered as part of the broader context of constitutional development in the post World War II Europe, a period of time, which was highly important also in this respect.