Proceedings of the International scientific and practical conference ―Science in the Era of Globalization‖ (May 22-24, 2026) / Publisher website: www.naukainfo.com. - Zurich, Switzerland, 2026. - 353 p.

72 for granting them protection. On the other hand, the exercise of this sovereign prerogative is limited by the international obligations of states in the field of human rights and international refugee protection. Thus, three interrelated components of the international legal regulation of asylum may be distinguished: the right of a state to grant asylum, the right of an individual to seek asylum, and the right of an individual to enjoy the protection granted [5, p. 113]. The first component consists of the state‘s right to grant asylum. This right derives from the principle of state sovereignty and means that each state has discretionary powers to decide whether to provide protection to a particular individual. The second component is the individual‘s right to seek asylum from persecution, enshrined in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). ―Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations‖ [6]. Although this provision does not guarantee the automatic granting of asylum, it imposes on states the obligation to ensure a real possibility for an individual to submit an application and to receive a fair and impartial examination of it. The third component relates to the individual‘s right to obtain international protection in cases where they meet the established international and national criteria, primarily those set out in the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol [2, 3]. In this context, it is necessary to distinguish between the legal status of a person who has submitted an application for asylum (an asylum seeker) and a person who has already been recognized as a refugee [7, p. 476]. Particular importance for the protection of asylum seekers is attached to Article 33 of the Convention, which enshrines the principle of non-refoulement. In contemporary international law, the scope of this principle extends not only to persons formally recognized as refugees but also to asylum seekers until a final determination of their legal status is made. Accordingly, a state is obliged to refrain from returning, expelling, or forcibly transferring a person to a country where there is