Granting church asylum - On the question of the political component in civil society engagement for refugees

Church asylum as a legal institution was officially abolished in the 19th century. There is no right to church asylum. Nevertheless, it has established and evolved as a modern practice of protection. It is a process characterized by contested and continuously changing procedural logics, agreements, and practices. Under certain conditions, church asylum is tolerated by the state – but also sanctioned, e.g. in the form of criminal prosecution of those involved in church asylum work. In connection with this, the legality and legitimacy of church asylum is repeatedly discussed in public (and also academic) discourse. However, no research exists that explicitly addresses the process of "granting" church asylum. The focus of this paper is to better understand this granting process. The central question is therefore: How is church asylum granted? In order to investigate this, the following set of questions is also addressed:

• Under what conditions is church asylum granted or denied?
• How is admission to church asylum decided? When is it denied?
• What are the connected challenges? Which forms of action and strategies of dealing with the situation on the part those active in the field can be identified here? 

In order to examine these questions, researchers in the project focus on the empirical investigation of the experiences, perspectives, interpretations and justifications of those involved in or "granting" church asylum within the framework of qualitative interviews. In this way, not only the granting process, but also those involved as significant players in the engagement field of church asylum within the civil society can be investigated more closely.

Although church asylum does not involve church actors deciding on asylum issues or granting asylum in the modern sense, it does interfere with state (asylum law) decisions. The role of those active in the field that makes them powerful actors within an asylum regime, at least temporarily, becomes visible.

Church asylum is negotiated in a discursive tension field of "humanitarian" vs. "political", it is thus closely linked to questions of "the political". At subject level, there is a permanent negotiation of where the boundaries of the political lie and whether church asylum is political or not. These understandings of and references to "the political" are to be understood as participating terms that belong to the object of observation and are reconstructed in the context of the work. This is primarily intended to highlight the political dimensions of such commitment or the ambivalences of humanitarian aid in providing church asylum.
What exactly is "the political" about granting church asylum and in what dimensions does it occur? What effects does it have?

The research questions aim to explore the phenomenon of church asylum in an exploratory manner.

Project duration:

ongoing, since 2021