Forthcoming in the Max Planck Yearbook of United Nations Law (27) Against this backdrop, the ILC decided to include ‘the right of asylum’ in its provisional list of topics for codification. Among the members of the Commission attending its first session, Jesús M. Yepes was by far the main supporter of its codification. In his interventions, the Colombian jurist constantly emphasized the humanitarian character of asylum, one of the ‘noblest creations of customary international law’.19 For him, ‘the right of political asylum should be given special priority’ while its codification was ‘eminently necessary and desirable’.20 He also insisted that the Havana Convention on Asylum (1928) and the Montevideo Convention on Political Asylum (1933) should be the basis for the discussion of the topic, which could be easily codified in ‘three or four articles’.21 His enthusiasm was rather understandable: Yepes was Colombia’s agent and main legal adviser in the Asylum (Colombia/Peru) case,22 which would be submitted to the ICJ in that same year. The dispute concerned the granting of diplomatic asylum, in the Colombian embassy in Lima, to Peruvian politician Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. Colombia relied on a ‘customary international law of the Americas’,23 which would provide for a right to grant asylum in legations and a corresponding obligation on the receiving state to respect the asylee’s safe exit (salvo conduto) from the country.24 It also maintained that, in accordance with such a rule, it was competent to unilaterally and definitively qualify the offence committed by the asylee as a political crime for the purpose of granting them diplomatic asylum. 25 Peru, on the other hand, claimed that it was not bound by treaty law, nor by (general or local) customary UN ILC, ‘Summary Records and Documents of the First Session, Including the Report of the Commission to the General Assembly’ in Yearbook of the International Law Commission 1949, vol. I (Part One) UN Doc. A/CN.4/2, at 126. 20 Ibid., at 47. 21 Ibid., at 57. 22 Asylum Case. 23 Asylum Case (Mémoire Présenté au nom du Gouvernement de la République de Colombie) [10 January 1950], at para. 25. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., at para. 5(d). 19 7 Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4816199