Asylum seeker
individual who seeks refuge, esp. political asylum, in a foreign country
An asylum seeker or asylum-seeker is a person who leaves their country of residence, enters another country, and makes in that other country a formal application for the right of asylum according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 14. A person keeps the status of asylum seeker until the right of asylum application has concluded.
The relevant immigration authorities of the country of asylum determine whether the asylum seeker will be granted the right of asylum protection or whether asylum will be refused and the asylum seeker becomes an illegal immigrant who may be asked to leave the country and may even be deported in line with non-refoulement. Signatories to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights create their own policies for assessing the protection status of asylum seekers, and the proportion of asylum applicants who are accepted or rejected varies each year from country to country.
The asylum seeker may be simultaneously recognized as a refugee and given refugee status if their circumstances fall into the definition of refugee according to the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees or regionally applicable refugee laws—such as the European Convention on Human Rights, if within the European Union.
The terms asylum seeker, refugee and illegal immigrant are often confused. In North American English, the term asylee is used both for an asylum seeker, as defined above, and a person whose right of asylum has been granted.
Asylum and protection
The right of asylum according to the Article 14 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
2.
The public source identifies “Asylum seeker” as individual who seeks refuge, esp. political asylum, in a foreign country. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Asylum, seeker and individual.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Asylum seeker”, the useful work is to connect “individual who seeks refuge, esp. political asylum, in a foreign country” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q564811. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Asylum seeker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.