Introductory Note by Igor Shoikhedbrod

E.B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) is best known for his General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), where he offered an original account of the genesis of the legal form under generalized conditions of capitalist commodity exchange and explained the reasons for its necessary disappearance under fully developed communism. Until recently,^[1] Pashukanis’ reputation as the token Marxist legal theorist has generally eclipsed his influential contributions as a seasoned revolutionary representing the USSR on the international stage. Nowhere is this clearer than in the domain of international criminal law and in Pashukanis’ consistent and vociferous defence of the right of asylum. In the 1929 essay that follows, Pashukanis—writing under the auspicious of the International Red Aid—offers a scathing indictment of the extradition of working class and communist political prisoners by capitalist countries in a global political context marked by the transition from the “age of liberalism” to that of “imperialist reaction”. Pashukanis’ critical reflections and his impassioned conclusion that every worker and every honest democrat must regard the struggle for the right of asylum as their foremost duty, remain all the more prescient today.

The Right of Asylum and the Practice of Bourgeois Governments^[2]

By E. Pashukanis

Translated by Daria Bayer and edited with the inclusion of notes by Igor Shoikhedbrod 

This year marks one hundred years since the publication of a work by the Dutch jurist Porokluit,^[3] in which, for the first time, a legal justification was given for the right of asylum for persons persecuted for political crimes. Four years later, Belgium—which owed its independence to a revolutionary uprising—proclaimed in a law the principle of non-extradition of persons accused of political crimes. A whole series of other states followed this same example. The principle of non-extradition of political refugees became a universally recognized principle of bourgeois international law. Only the semi-feudal monarchies stubbornly refused to recognize this principle. In 1833, the same year in which the Belgian law was adopted, the three monarchies of Russia, Austria, and Prussia concluded special agreements on the mutual extradition of all criminals accused of high treason, lèse-majesté, and other political offences. The law of Tsarist Russia of 1911 likewise provided for the extradition of persons accused of political offences. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie in the leading capitalist states, alarmed by the growth of the proletarian revolutionary movement, became increasingly reactionary. The right of asylum for persecuted revolutionaries was restricted in various ways.

In 1856, under pressure from Bonapartist France, an amendment to the Belgian law was adopted according to which those refugees accused of an attempted assassination on a head of state or members of his family were excluded from asylum protections. Gradually, this amendment was adopted by all other states, with the exception of England and Switzerland. In 1881, Tsarist Russia attempted to widen this loophole further by proposing that refugees accused of murder should not be regarded as political offenders at all.^[4] This proposal, however, was unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the right of asylum was increasingly restricted. In 1892, Switzerland adopted a new law on the extradition of criminals, which also allowed the extradition of persons accused of political offences, namely insofar as the Swiss court determined that the offence in question represented an ordinary crime rather than a political crime. At the same time, bourgeois scholars of international law proposed that so-called “social crimes”—by which they meant actions directed against any social and political order, that is, against the class rule of the bourgeoisie—be excluded from the category of political crimes.

These reactionary tendencies only fully came to the fore following the war and in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Frightened by the workers’ movement, bourgeois governments are attempting to return Europe to the times of the Holy Alliance^[5] and are trying to create an international police organization for the persecution of the vanguard of the working class. To this end, a fierce campaign is waged, above all, against the right of asylum. Particularly characteristic of this campaign were the resolutions adopted in August 1928 by the Warsaw Congress on international law. The legal experts, assembled on the Vistula, resolved that the extradition of political criminals must in all cases take place whenever the crime involved an offence against human life.

Here we can observe the revival of attempts, already undertaken by Tsarist autocracy in 1881, to entirely suppress the right of asylum. Agreements on the extradition of political offenders are likewise reappearing, reminiscent of absolutist times, when sovereigns, out of mutual courtesy, surrender to one another all persons [accused of] conspiring against their supreme authority, the majesty of the crown, and [of being] deserters.

Such agreements were recently concluded, for example, between Italy and Cuba, and between Italy and Panama. No active fighter in the anti-fascist movement who has escaped the bloody methods of persecution of Mussolini’s government can henceforth feel safe even beyond the ocean. Recently, for example, the Republic of Panama extradited the political émigré Isidoro Azzario^[6] to Italy.

The countries of white terror assist one another in this respect. Bulgaria extradites Italian political émigrés to Mussolini’s government. The Hungarian government succeeded in obtaining Turkey’s consent to the surrender of Hungarian political émigrés.

But even in countries regarded as role models in matters of democratic guarantees, the principle of non-extradition of political prisoners is consistently contested. Bourgeois governments have no scruples about violating their own laws. Thus, for example, it is generally assumed that in the Austrian Republic the right of asylum for political prisoners is upheld. Nevertheless, in practice we find a series of cases over the years where the Austrian government extradited revolutionaries who had fled Austria to the Hungarian or Yugoslav authorities. At the end of 1926, Austria extradited the political émigré Jagoditsch at the request of the Hungarian government; in February 1927 the political émigré Bartholom Vincze was handed over to the Hungarian authorities. In the same year, twelve Yugoslav communists who had fled to Austria were extradited at the border to the Yugoslav authorities.

This practice of the Austrian government, which willingly aids the bloody fascist justice of its neighboring states, provoked an energetic protest some time ago from a number of well-known German intellectuals. When, in the autumn of the previous year, it became known that the Austrian police were planning the extradition of the revolutionary fighter Peter Iskrov^[7] to the Bulgarian authorities, who had been sentenced to death in Bulgaria, a whole series of German scholars and writers addressed a letter to the Austrian ambassador emphasizing that such an act would arouse general indignation and antipathy toward the Austrian regime.

But the number of violations of the right of asylum is not limited merely to the provocative cases in which a revolutionary émigré is handed over to the executioners of the country demanding their surrender. Much more often this right is violated through arbitrary police arrests and expulsions, of which political émigrés are the [main] victims. In most democratic bourgeois states, the émigré—especially the proletarian or even communist émigré—is nothing more than a completely rightless being who can at any moment and under any pretext be arrested and deported abroad. The Austrian authorities arrest and expel dozens and hundreds of political émigrés. Particularly after the July uprising, these expulsions assumed a mass character.

Political émigrés expelled abroad are immediately imprisoned in other “hospitable” states and often even sent back. Such harassment was inflicted, for example, on sixteen Italian anti-fascists who were expelled to Belgium and then sent back again by the Belgian authorities. In France, it is enough for a foreign worker merely to join a trade union organization for him to be arrested and deported abroad. Polish, Yugoslav, Italian, and other émigrés in France are completely at the mercy of the police’s good will. Expulsions in that country have taken on a mass character. Interior Minister [Albert-Pierre] Sarraut declared in the Senate that from August 1926 to March 1928, 13,230 foreigners were expelled from France. Arrested émigrés suffer unbelievably brutal and often downright bestial treatment at the hands of the French police. Several cases are known in which émigrés were severely abused. A Polish worker, a member of the communist party cell at the Citroën factory, was dragged by the hair during interrogation by a police agent and violently thrown to the ground. He was first dragged into a damp cellar, where he was subsequently beaten and savagely kicked. Similarly, the Hungarian worker Szekeres, the Spaniard Ibaern, six Polish workers arrested in the mines of Pien (Mertes) and Moselle, among many others, were mistreated.

The French police are striving to revive the prison practices of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia.

The government of the United States of America likewise does not lag behind France. In 1926 alone, 10,904 émigrés were expelled from America. The leader of the anti-fascist movement, the Italian Enea Sormenti,^[8] was already about to be deported when a powerful wave of protest from the working people forced the United States government to rescind its decision.

The tragic fate of the Egyptian revolutionary fighter Mazur Riffad shows what harassment and persecution await political émigrés seeking refuge in the present-day “democratic” states. Banished from Egypt and subsequently expelled several times from France, Switzerland, and Germany, this man—literally hunted to death—finally, having found no place of refuge anywhere, committed suicide in Reichenau (Austria).

It is useful to compare the disenfranchisement of political émigrés belonging to the labor movement and revolutionary circles with the freedom of action enjoyed everywhere by the Russian White Guards. The latter are permitted not only self-help [aid] organizations but also various openly political organizations. The activities of these political organizations are protected and supported by many governments, even in cases where they bear an openly criminal character.

These facts speak for themselves. The right of asylum is seriously endangered. Attempts are being made to completely abolish it. Where this principle still exists on paper, it is circumvented and even openly violated in practice. The bourgeoisie is moving away from the principles it proclaimed in the age of liberalism. Imperialist reaction is striving to revive the legal practices of the age of absolutism. Under these conditions, every worker and every honest democrat must regard the struggle for the right of asylum, led by the IRH [Internationale Rote Hilfe], as his foremost duty.

^[1] See Igor Shoikhedbrod and Rafael Khachaturian “E.B. Pashukanis’ 1927 Speech on ‘Emergency Legislation Against the Toilers and Their Organisations’: Explication and Critical Analysis.” Law and Critique 37, 1–20 (2026); Igor Shoikhedbrod, “The Form and Content of Crime and Punishment in the Period of Revolutionary Transition: Interrogating E. B. Pashukanis’ Interventions at the 1929 International Conference of Jurists in Berlin,” RphZ – Rechtsphilosophie,12, 26-39 (2026); and Igor Shoikhedbrod and Bjarne Melkevik, “E.B. Pashukanis on Terrorism, Political Crime, and International Law: The Copenhagen Congress of 1935.” forthcoming in Retfærd: Nordic Journal of Law and Justice.

^[2] Originally published in German as E. Paschukanis, „Das Asylrecht und die Praxis der bürgerlichen Regierungen”, in: MOPR. Zeitschrift für Kampf und Arbeit der Internationalen Roten Hilfe 4(1929), Nr. 3, S. 4-7. We are grateful to Sara Verveer from the International Institute of Social History for providing us with a scanned version of Pashukanis’ essay.  

^[3] It is not clear to whom Pashukanis is referring here. Hugo Grotius, whose work Pashukanis read, is usually regarded as the theoretical founder of the modern concept of asylum, but he does not fit Pashukanis’ timeline. 

^[4] Translator’s note: i.e. as potentially being entitled to asylum protections.

^[5] The “Holy Alliance” refers to the coalition between the absolute monarchies of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, which was established following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 with the stated goal of upholding Christian values and securing monarchical power in Europe. 

^[6] Isidoro Azzario (1884-1929 or 1930) was an Italian politician and trade unionist. 

^[7] Peter Iskrov (1891-1938) was a revolutionary fighter and member of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP), who was executed in Moscow during the height of Stalin’s Great Terror. 

^[8] Vittorio Vidali (1900 –1983)