Last month, a bizarre criminal-legal odyssey in Vancouver drew to a close. Mikhail Lennikov, an ex-KGB agent facing deportation from Canada back to Russia, where he feared persecution and prosecution alike, came out of hiding and agreed to leave the nation. A tale of spies and immigration law, studded with details about the wife and child Lennikov would be forced to leave behind, it was an emotional saga. But perhaps the most interesting tidbit was how the fugitive evaded justice for so long: In 2009, he wandered into Vancouver’s First Lutheran Church and claimed sanctuary, which the Canadian Border Services Agency didn’t challenge for six years, until Lennikov decided he no longer feared his fate in Russia and left his sacred hideout of his own accord. It’s a tale that should leave all of us scratching out heads, bemused by the fact that religious sanctuary is apparently still a thing in the modern, highly secular world.
Most of us were probably introduced to sanctuary as a Christian concept via Victor Hugo’s 1831 The Hunchback of Notre Dame (or, more realistically, the 1996 Disney adaptation of the book), a tale set in France in 1482. It is, to us, a thoroughly medieval institution. But sanctuary is actually even more ancient than that, going all the way back to pre-Christian traditions in classical Greece and Rome, in which certain areas were so holy that those who entered them had protection. The Romans thought at times that these institutions were being abused by criminals, but never managed to break the practice, allowing it to seep into the Old Testament, which suggested that church altars ought to be a safe space for those who’d committed accidental murders and called for the establishment of sanctuary cities. This basic plea evolved by 300 C.E. into a Christian doctrine, whereby if a criminal got a body part into a church, onto its edifice, or upon its grounds, then so long as he or she had not committed sacrilege, some clemency was granted.
Medieval European states, legitimized by the powerful Christian church of the era, wound up writing sanctuary into their legal codes. Some states, like the Germans, compelled criminals to renounce sanctuary if officials agreed to forego the death penalty, while the church itself in Catholic canon law promoted sanctuary as an often-temporary solution to allow cooler heads to prevail in the name of due process in violent or hot button crimes. But the institution reached its zenith in England, where by the 700s criminals could avoid punishment by paying a fine to a church to attain sanctuary or, barring payment, use the church as an avenue to become a religious servant for life or flee into exile. By the 1200s, the state had expressly chartered sanctuary sites. Sometimes kings pushed on this tradition, but up to 1,000 criminals a year achieved clemency.
Yet as the Protestant Reformation spread through Europe in the 16th century, local rulers started pushing harder on sanctuary, which robbed them of the chance to control their legal system in total. Even the diehard pro-sanctuary English started chipping away at regulations on who could seek sanctuary until in 1623 King James I abolished the institution for criminal offenses, and in 1697 William III did the same for civil offenses, setting a precedent for other Western nations. This means that America, and many other modern nations, were born with no tradition of officially sanctioned sanctuary protocols. It took a few hundred years more, but by 1983, the Catholic Church even abandoned sanctuary, deferring to modern legal systems for due process.
Despite the slow decline of sanctuary, a few churches still continue to offer this protection in theory into the modern day. Anglican, Lutheran and United church leadership actually issues regulations for local churches to use in deciding whom to grant protection to, as dozens of criminals of one stripe or another still flock to them seeking protection every year. In the 1800s, most of these “criminals” were slavse or abolitionists. Then in the late 1960s and 1970s, they were conscientious objectors fleeing the draft for the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, hundreds of North American churches banded together to form a united sanctuary movement, seeking to protect Central American refugees, rejected by the United States government, from political violence in the region. Most recently in America, the 2006 case of Elvira Arellano, an illegal Mexican immigrant trying to avoid deportation and subsequent separation from her seven-year-old son, an American citizen by birth, drew attention back to the self-proclaimed right of sanctuary, which has since been used by dozens of churches and illegals to draw attention to American immigration policies and the very human plight of those caught up in the system.
In Canada, too, churches today use sanctuary mainly to offer stopgap protection to raise political awareness of deportation cases that local congregations think highlight serious flaws or negative trends in national immigration policies. In 2009, when Lennikov sought asylum, two other individuals sought sanctuary: Gankhuyag Bumuutseren, a Mongolian who spied on Chinese dissidents in the U.S. for Beijing, who sought refuge in Toronto, and Rodney Watson, an Iraqi war deserter from America avoiding extradition back home for trial in a Vancouver church. But Canadian officials have recorded dozens of sanctuary claims across the nation in the past few decades—and church officials claim that criminals come seeking aid on a weekly basis.
American, Canadian, and other authorities often don’t act on these cases because of the bad PR that would be involved in raiding a church. On a case-by-case basis, they decide whether to violate this tacit allowance, usually acting only when the sanctuary seeker is violent or dangerous, in their estimation, to national security or the local community. (The Canada Border Services Agency’ enshrined this principle in a new 2010 policy, which requires a review process to approve an officer’s judgment of a criminal’s threat before he or she acts against a church’s sanctuary claims. They maintain that if they ever see abuse of the practice, then they will clamp down harder, though.) Yet given church scrutiny of the background of asylum applicants, that’s rarely an issue.
That leaves us with a de facto system of sanctuary in place in many nations, fueled by the continued moral position and rigorous vetting of churches. But it’s not a blanket institution that you can use if you get into trouble. Churches use this system as a political tool, raising awareness around what they see as injustices. So unless you’ve got a strong case that you’ve been wrongfully accused of a crime, or that you’re part of a controversial political witch-hunt or the victim of a disputed policy of which you know a local church disapproves, don’t go seeking sanctuary, because it probably won’t be granted. But if you are embroiled in a very political scandal, like espionage or illegal immigration, then by all means go for the sanctuary route—if you don’t mind endless publicity and living in one room forever on very limited local charity.
