Lack of individual rights to political asylum

Under international law, the protection granted by a state to a foreign citizen against his own state, is a right of the state not of the individual. The person for whom asylum may be established has no legal right to demand it, and the state has no obligation to grant it. Under such legislation, a person unable or unwilling to return to his country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or for political opinion, is never certain that his request will be conceded definitively.