Link: Here’s what happens to asylum-seekers who stay in airport limbo indefinitely

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Somebody

Pretty cool article that conjures up thoughts of The Terminal. It considers Edward Snowden hiding out at the Moscow airport and how it works.

“Airport transit zones are weird places, as my colleague Max Fisher laid out in a post this morning. That space technically falls under no specific jurisdiction, a legal convention evolved to make travel and passport control more convenient. But it also doubles, conveniently, as an excuse for non-intervention in highly politicized or troublesome cases, when acting would provoke some kind of diplomatic snafu.”

Russia has done this before.

In 2007, the Iranian dissident Zahra Kamalfar spent 11 months living in the Sheremetyevo airport with her two young children before finding asylum in Canada. As Toronto’s CBC News reports, Kamalfar used false papers to fly out of Iran, where she had been jailed for attending a political rally. Once in Russia, the family was kept under house arrest at a Moscow hotel before authorities dropped them off at the airport – letting them avoid both the bad PR of deportation and diplomatic conflict with Iran.

 

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