Editing Sanctuary (section)

====Political asylum====
During the [[Wars of the Roses]] of the 15th century when the Lancastrians or [[House of York|Yorkists]] would suddenly gain the upper hand by winning a battle, some adherents of the losing side might find themselves surrounded by adherents of the winning side and unable to return to their own side, so they would rush to sanctuary at the nearest church until it was safe to leave it. A prime example is Queen [[Elizabeth Woodville]], consort of [[Edward IV of England]].

In 1470, when the Lancastrians briefly restored [[Henry VI of England|Henry VI]] to the throne, Edward's queen was living in London with several young daughters. She moved with them into [[Westminster Abbey]] for sanctuary, living there in royal comfort until Edward was restored to the throne in 1471 and giving birth to their first son [[Edward V of England|Edward]] during that time. When King Edward IV died in 1483, Elizabeth (who was highly unpopular with even the Yorkists and probably did need protection) took her five daughters and youngest son (Richard, Duke of York; Prince Edward had his own household by then) and again moved into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. She had all the comforts of home; she brought so much furniture and so many chests that the workmen had to break holes in some of the walls to move everything in fast enough to suit her.{{citation needed|date=April 2007}}

In the 20th century, during [[World War I]], all of [[Russia]]'s [[Allies of World War I|Allies]] made the controversial decision in 1917 to deny political sanctuary to Tsar [[Nicholas II]] [[Romanov]] and his immediate family when he was overthrown in that year's [[February Revolution]] part of the [[Russian Revolution]] because of his abuses of power and forced to [[abdicate]] in March in favor of [[Alexander Kerensky]]'s [[Russian Provisional Government]]. Nicholas and his family and remaining household were sent to [[Tobolsk]], [[Siberia]] that summer while Kerensky kept Russia in the war when it couldn't win, enabling [[Lenin]] and his [[Bolshevik]]s to gain the Russian people's support in overthrowing Kerensky in that year's [[October Revolution]]. The [[Russian Civil War]] started that November and in July, 1918, with Lenin losing the civil war, [[Shooting of the Romanov family|Nicholas and his family were executed]] on Lenin's orders while confined to the [[Ipatiev House]] in [[Yekaterenburg]].

In 1939, months before [[World War II]] began, 937 [[Jewish]] refugees from [[Nazi Germany]] on board the [[MS St. Louis]] met the same fate, first by [[Cuba]]—their original destination—and afterwards by the [[United States]] and [[Canada]]. As a result, 620 of them were forced back to Europe, where many of them died in [[Nazi concentration camps]] during the war. This incident was the subject of [[Gordon Thomas (author)|Gordon Thomas']] and [[Max Morgan-Witts]]' 1974 novel, ''[[Voyage of the Damned]]'' and its 1976 [[movie]] adaptation.

In 1970, [[Simonas Kudirka]] was denied U.S. sanctuary when he attempted to defect from the then-Soviet Union by jumping from his "mother ship", 'Sovetskaya Litva', onto the [[USCGC Vigilant]] when it was sailing from [[New Bedford]] while Kudirka's ship was anchored at [[Martha's Vineyard]]. Kudrika was accused of stealing 3,000 [[Soviet rouble|roubles]] from Sovetskaya Litva's [[safe]] and when the [[United States Department of State|U.S. State Department]] didn't help him, Kudrika was sent back to the Soviet Union, where he was convicted of [[treason]] and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Because Kudirka could claim American citizenship through his mother, he was allowed to return to the United States in 1974. His plight was the subject of Algis Ruksenas' 1973 book ''Day of Shame: The Truth About The Murderous Happenings Aboard the Cutter Vigilant During the Russian-American Confrontation off Martha's Vineyard'' and the 1978 [[TV movie]] ''The Defection of Simas Kudirka'', starring [[Alan Arkin]].

Ten years later, [[Ukraine|Ukrainian]] youth, [[Walter Polovchak]], became a [[cause célèbre]] in the 1980s because of his request in 1980 at age 12 to remain in the United States permanently after announcing that he didn't want to return with his parents to what was then [[Soviet Ukraine]], and was the subject of a five-year struggle between U.S. and Soviet courts over his fate, which was decided in his favor in 1985 when Walter turned 18 that October 3 and was no longer a juvenile and thus no longer required to return to the Soviet Union if he didn't want to.

Also in the 1980s, [[Estonia]]n national and alleged [[Nazi war criminal]], [[Karl Linnas]], was the target of several sanctuary denials outside the United States before he was finally returned in 1987 to the then-[[USSR]] to face a highly likely [[death penalty]] for alleged war crimes that he was convicted of in 1962 (see [[Holocaust trials in Soviet Estonia]]). Linnas died of a heart attack in a Leningrad prison hospital on July 2, 1987, while waiting for a possible retrial in [[Gorbachev]]'s courts, 25 years after [[Khrushchev]]'s courts convicted him [[Trial in absentia|in absentia]].