Quandary on the Yalu: International Law, Politics, and China's North Korean Refugee Crisis
![handle is hein.journals/stanit40 and id is 153 raw text is: Quandary on the Yalu:
International Law, Politics,
and China's North Korean
Refugee Crisis
BENJAMIN NEADERLAND*
For an oppressed people, foreign embassies can be beacons of hope. In the
fall of 1989, thousands of East Germans, traveling legally in their fellow
Warsaw Pact nations of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, sought asylum in the
West German embassy compounds in Budapest and Prague.' Earlier that year,
Hungary had temporarily allowed East Germans on its territory to cross over to
West Germany through neutral Austria,2 but now the only viable exit to the
West was through the embassies.3
These East German asylum seekers knew that West Germany's embassies
in Hungary and Czechoslovakia could offer them sanctuary. More important,
however, West Germany's Constitution, with its promise of citizenship to all
Germans,4 was a magnet for East Germans seeking the freedom and
prosperity that eluded them at home.
This dramatic ploy by the asylum seekers was followed by an equally
dramatic and unexpected decision by the Czechoslovakian and Hungarian
* Associate, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Washington, D.C.; J.D., Stanford Law School, 2003;
M.A. (International Relations), Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies,
1995; B.A., University of Virginia, 1992; European political-military analyst, Office of the Secretary of
Defense, 1997-2000; Foreign Affairs Legislative Assistant to U.S. Senator William S. Cohen, 1995-97.
Thanks to Ambassador Richard Momingstar for his guidance; to the editors of the Stanford Journal of
International Law for their excellent work; to Dr. Andrew Scobell, U.S. Army War College, for his
helpful comments; and to Katherine McCarron, wife and editor extraordinaire. This Note was originally
presented at the Yale Journal ofInternational Law Young Scholar's Conference, 2003.
1 Clamor in the East: The Upheaval in East Germany: A Singular Month Produces an Exodus,
N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 10, 1989, at A 16 [hereinafter Clamor in the East].
2 Wayne C. Thompson, Germany and the East, 53 EuR.-ASIA STUD. 921, 923 (2001) (noting that
Budapest informed the irate East German leaders that the human rights agreements accepted at the
Helsinki Conference in 1975 superseded earlier bilateral treaties preventing the free movement of
peoples).
3 Clamor in the East, supra note 1, at A 16.
4 Article 116 of the Basic Law, The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany, reads, [A]
German within the meaning of this Basic Law is a person who possesses German citizenship or who has
been admitted to the territory of the German Reich within the boundaries of December 31, 1937 as a
refugee or expellee of German ethnic origin or as the spouse or descendant of such person.
GRUNDGESETZ [GG] [Constitution] art. 116, § 1 (F.R.G). Because the post-war drafters of the Basic
Law wrote broadly of Germans rather than West Germans, the Basic Law was read to grant West
German citizenship to East Germans automatically. See Simon Green, Deutschland ist ein
Einwanderungsland: Immigration and Citizenship from the Bonn to the Berlin Republics 5 (2000)
(discussion paper, on file with author) (noting that because Article 116 included the territory of the GDR
[the German Democratic Republic-East Germany], all of its citizens were automatically German
citizens too).
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40 STAN. J. INT'L L. 143 (2004)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/stanit40&div=10&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Quandary on the Yalu: International Law, Politics, and China's North Korean Refugee Crisis
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