The essay deals with the three main issues relating to asylum: its nature related to the evolution undergone over the centuries; and its setting between law, human rights and international law; its current pattern among the conventions international - in particular those introduced by the Council of Europe - and within the European Union. Since the right of asylum is not a real individual right but a mere interest occasionally protected, the impossibility of its absolute guarantee against the State reveals how human rights are not suited to overcome the failure of modern political rationalism, as can confirm the difficulties of the EU rules, which inevitably remain prisoners of the principle of sovereignty. Considering instead the dimension originally politic of the human being - in the classic sense - we can approach to retrieve the core of the theoretical right to asylum, which is based on the recognition of human dignity that is shared between whoever hosts and those who are hosted.
