There is no such thing as an international right for asylum in an embassy, except within the confines of Article 14 of the UDHR, which involves only prosecution for political crimes. Rape is not a political crime. The arrest warrant has "rape" checked as the reason.
The UK would close the embassy. It would then be private property without protection, harboring a fugitive. They could turn him over or they could be stormed as any other private property harboring a fugitive would be.
And I let my rapist walk me back to my f***ing car and waited for him while he peed on the street. Have you never heard of "shock" before? Do you have any clue how hard it is to get yourslf to accept the fact that you've been raped? As soon as he left she immediately cleaned up and washed everything in her apartment, especially the semen spot on her bed, after washing herself, and then called her friends, distraught (matching their testimony).
Like most people, I couldn't get myself to file charges. I just wanted to forget about it. I couldn't imagine going through a trial, having to face him more, and all of the smears that I know would have been directed against me for being some "slut trying to ruin an innocent man's life". And he was a nobody, not someone with a legion of millions of global fans. I mean, my god, I've seen websites about these women that are basically stalker sites.
I did nothing. But if I had found out shortly after that he had done the *same sort of thing thing* to another girl right around the same time as what he did to me? I still don't know if I would have filed charges, but it definitely would have changed the picture.
But let's suppose that something unconsentual has taken place here.
During sleep it's *always* non-consentual. A sleeping person *cannot consent*, period.
then I will publicly come out here and eat my words.
You'll need to do more than eat your words. What is the proper way to apologize for smearing rape victims?
Really? Discouraging copycats and preventing the allowance of someone to cheat their way out of the British justice system isn't worth a possible (but improbable) disruption of a piddling amount of trade with a small South-American nation while winning brownie points from Sweden?
People have tried to move people via diplomatic bags before. It's never worked, at least as far as is known (there's one suspected case from Egypt long ago, but it's not really certain). It failed with Mordechai Ben Masoud Louk, it failed with Umaru Dikko, etc. And it especially wouldn't work if you tried it on something as obviously in violation of the Vienna Convention as a car. The British have already made it quite clear that they plan to stop any vehicles leaving the embassy.
Embassies are not magic. Their immunity basically only extends as far as the host state is willing to tolerate them, because ultimately, the host state has all the cards, including the right to expel diplomats and close embassies altogether. The more the embassy tries to f*** with the laws of the host state and cheat the Vienna Convention, the less they tend to be tolerated. And Ecuador already has a less than stellar record with their diplomatic pouches (they got caught using them to smuggle cocaine to Italy once)
If 'by a few weeks community service" you mean "up to four years in prison", yes.
What world do you live on where having sex with a sleeping person (let alone in a manner that you know they'd refuse, which they'd been refusing all night) is a community-service offence?
He's not going to the Pentagon. He's going to Sweden in accordance with the European Arrest Warrant. Where they'll take their time, try him, and convict him, and he'll serve in a Swedish prison. All nice and legal. A few years later when he walks, nobody will care about him anymore.
"Prisoners of war" is totally different from "losing diplomatic immunity". Ecuador countering in kind by closing the British embassy? It'd be tolerated, and pretty much expected. Making *captives* out of the diplomats? Ecuador would find itself with some new craters if they tried that, and the British public would support it. The British aren't exactly flower children when it comes to the use of their military, in case you didn't notice, even when their citizens *aren't* at risk.
"Embassies to militarize"? Really? So embassies are supposed to now try to hold off the *entire armed forces* of their host country?
Let's jump back to reality again, thank you.
And actually, most of the diplomatic world has long been more concerned with the issue of the fact that there's no solid international framework on what to do when people seek to hide out in embassies than the fact that whenever two nations get into a major spat, they usually end up threatening to or even actually revoking each other's embassies at some point.
It really has nothing to do with Assange at this point. It has to do with whether a person can escape the UK justice system. He could be a guy accused of stealing a frozen chicken dinner from the local Iceland, but if he was escaping charges confirmed by their high court and jumping bail and creating an international incident, the *last* thing they want is him to have some sort of successful resolution out of it that will encourage others to likewise try to evade the UK justice system
And, FYI, two courts in the UK found the charges against him credible and that they'd be a violation of UK law if they occurred there.
Really? As if embassies haven't been booted before? As if, for example, Bolivia has been threatening to do the same to the US embassy there for the past several months? Which nobody seems to care about what it does with embassies because it's a small impoverished south-American state oh wait a minute....
And it definitely has nothing to do with having sex with a sleeping person (in violation of the terms set when they were awake, not like that matters), pinning down another and trying to force her legs open to have sex without a condom, etc. It's all about Assange. It's always all about Assange. After all, he's God. Actually, that's not my favorite of Assange's diary entries; that has to be the one where he says that there will be no great breakthroughs by women in the field of mathematics because " they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world..", but he hopes that a (presumably male) neuroscientist will create a new "female" mathematics for them to help them out.
First off, the parent was talking about any two-bit thug who decides that he wants to evade arrest and so goes into the nearest third-world embassy with a bribe for protection to the ambassador. People seeking asylum in embassies is rare, and governments want to keep it that way. These cases generally also resolve themselves shortly; they are almost never allowed to fester for long periods of time, for precisely the reason that people charged with crimes having a "can't touch me" zone is generally something that states don't like to have.
Secondly, embassies are hosted at the will of the host country. Britain is fully within their rights to close the Ecuadorian embassy. They even have added legal clout, as part of the charter for embassies is that they are to exist only to conduct diplomatic work and not interfere in the legal system of their host countries.
This will all be over soon. At least the "running" part.
It's not even really rape; note that his so called crime only carries a crappy fine as punishment. Oh, and he isn't being charged either.
Are you going for a new record in "how dense can I pack errors about the assange case"?
1) The checkbox on the arrest warrant for "rape" was marked, and the UK courts found that the charges would be rape even under UK law (most notably, having sex with a person who's asleep, even ignoring that he did so without a condom which had been made clear was a precondition of sex with her - it's *always* illegal) 2) The charges are with penalties of up to four years in prison. 3) He cannot be charged in absentia under Swedish law. There is a series of steps which must be taken in order to lead to formal charges, and not all of them have been taken yet. Hence the warrant to continue the process. The European Arrest Warrant makes it clear that he is to be returned with intent to charge. Which also means it makes no sense to send over Swedish interrogators to the UK - not like anyone should have to give famous people special treatment anyway just because they say to.
Here's Ardin's thesis, titled "The Cuban Multi-Party System: Is The Democratic alternative really democratic and an alternative after the Castro regime?" The word rape does not appear in it.
Oh, really, it's time to look at *everything a person has ever written on the internet*, really? Like you've never written anything that others could use to discredit you online, ever? Really? First off, the "seven steps to revenge" 1) was a repost, 2) begins with, basically, "don't", and is 3) in general about how, if you do, how to cause an ex boyfriend's new girlfriend to break up with him.
Secondly, if you want to take the "anything you've ever written", let's see what Assange thinks about women.
I was exactly what she secretly longed for; a man willing to openly disagree with her father. All along she had needed a man to devote herself to. All along she had failed to find a man worthy of being called a man, failed to find a man who would not bow to gods, so she had chosen a god unworthy of being called a god, but who would not bow to a man.
Wow, really Julian? You're a freaking God to women? And do we even need to get into his dating profile, Mr. I AM DANGER, ACHTUNG?
See how this "dig up anything a person has ever written" game works?
Wow, what the frick is up with your "one bullet point on a website" link? It's not a reference to anything - nothing is backed up in any way, shape or form - but man, what a stalker site that is.
You need to work on your reading comprehension on the Mundo article you linked. It says she worked as the head of the Swedish group connected to the party, a party based on peaceful civil disobedience. "Somehow" funding it? It says right there - she funded it "minimally" with the magazine Consenso. Nowhere does it say she was deported. That's only said in the counterpunch article, which the article you linked to describes as riddled with errors. And furthermore, in what f-ed up world does supporting democracy in Cuba mean "CIA agent"? I mean, for crying out loud!
The interrogation does not at all say what you nor the person who posted it claim it says. The part about Wilen hearing the news reads as follows:
Sofia and I were notified during the interrogation that Julian Assange had been arrested in absentia. Sofia had difficulty concentrating after that news, whereby I made the judgement it was best to terminate the interrogation. But Sofia had time anyway to explain that Assange was angry with her. I didn't have time to get any further details about why he was angry with her or how this manifested itself. And we didn't have time to get into what else happened afterwards. The interrogation was neither read back to Sofia nor reviewed for approval by her but Sofia was told she had the opportunity to do this later.
Amazing how "difficulty concentrating" and concerned that "Assange was angry with her" transforms into "horrified" that they brought charges. I also noted (to put it another way, it made me sick to read) how the person who posted the article tried to spin the following passage as "consent":
They fell asleep and she woke by feeling him penetrate her. She immediately asked 'are you wearing anything' and he answered 'you'. She told him 'you better not have HIV' and he replied 'of course not'. She felt it was too late. He was already inside her and she let him continue. She couldn't be bothered telling him again. She'd been nagging about condoms all night lo
One-sentence response: given that approximately 0.002% of UK court cases (at the current going rate) are overturned by the ECRH, how on Earth can you possibly claim that this means that there's even remotely probable odds that a random case is problematic?
There are some cases where lambda-d functions improve clarity. For example, lambdas make for very clear, concise threading of simple tasks using the new C++11 threading operations.
Really, many of the new features play so beautifully together. For example, you can write a simple packet reader/parser which:
* Loops indefinitely * Waits until data can be read * Spawns the processing of that data in its own thread and resumes holding and processing packets, while in the spawned thread: * Proper type of packet is determined * Appropriate packet object is created * Packet object processed * Packet object deallocated
Using code one-liners like:
while (true) { auto PacketData=ReadPacket(); thread([]{ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}).detach(); }
or
while (true) { thread([](auto PacketData){ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}, ReadPacket()).detach(); }
Now, it's stylistically better to spread it out over a couple lines, and the above assumes that you're "using" std, have written your packet factory and socket reader, etc. However, it gives you an idea of how powerful the new features are. In normal code I'd probably write something like:
while (true) {
std::string PacketData(ReadPacket());
std::thread([]{ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}).detach(); }
Again, to reiterate, this is just from memory; I've not tried to compile these.
My argument is that your original implication that the UK courts are infallible is clearly false. Your figures prove this.
Nothing is infallable in this world. Nothing is perfect. But it's hard to beat "one of the best records in the EHCR".
Your figures also show that of those case that are deemed credible enough for a hearing, over half of them succede in overturning the British court's decision.
And? What, you expect courts to hear cases that it finds *not* credible? Look at the percentages of cases in the EHCR. Turkey and Russia have big human rights problems in their judicial systems. The UK does not. The statistics bear this out. I'm sorry that you don't like this fact, but it's what the numbers say.
the point remains that the UK courts are still fallible.
So is the concept that the Earth isn't flat, but that won't stop me from traveling internationally. The argument "It must be 100% perfection or else people I like shouldn't have to face trial" is about as absurd as you can get.
Is your argument honestly that because some tiny fraction of cases in Britain are brought to the ECHR, and of those, only one-in-200 is found credible, that therefore the British court system can't be trusted? I mean, *really*? Turkey and Russia alone split nearly half of the negative judgements by the EHCR. The UK barely even makes the list.
Linguistics. "Accusations", is that better? He can't be formally charged in Sweden in absentia. The checkbox for "rape" was listed on the European Arrest Warrant anyway.
You're grossly misunderstanding how these things work. Assange is not a diplomat. He has no immunity. He can't be given immunity because immunity must be conferred by a host country. There is no right preventing a diplomatic vehicle from being stopped. There is no magic get-out-of-jail card here, as much as you want there to be one. There's just a weird little loophole that as long as he's in an embassy building, he's safe. At least, temporarily. Because there's also no reason Britain can't decide to close the Ecuadorian embassy at will as punishment for violating their justice system. Whose opinion do you think the UK cares about more, the US's and Sweden's, or Ecuador's? Not to mention that there may be perfectly legal ways to force Ecuador to evict him, since embassies are required to only do business related to their charter and not interfere with the justice systems of their host countries. Really, the immunity of embassies is only as good as how afraid you are of annoying the sending state.
And, FYI, there is no international "right to asylum". Most South American states recognize one, but the rest of the world does not.
Lift ratio of hot air really sucks, though. Steam can get you a much better lift ratio without having to use He or H2, but it's a pain to work with (it tends to condense on the skin, even if insulated, leaving streams of water that need to be collected and which can try to form puddles on the skin and all sorts of other problems). Ammonia works, but lift ratio is worse than steam and it's of course highly toxic in quantities like that. Methane works, but is also flammable, and if you're going for flammable, why not H2, which is a many times better lifting gas? N2 is an inert lifting gas, but only baaaaarely. Neon is better, but very rare. And there are a few even more ridiculous options for things that work as lifting gases on earth, like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen fluoride and diborane, which we can rule out immediately. And do we really need to go all sci-fi with the plasma balloon or vacuum balloon concepts?;)
Probably the best "inert" mix you can get while minimizing helium consumption is about 90-91% helium, 7.5% hydrogen, and 1.5-2.5% water vapor. Hydrogen in those quantities cannot hold a sustained burn in the case of a leak (7.5% H2 in air burns, but by the time enough oxygen is mixed into a H2/He mix, the H2 ratio is too low), and you can get about that much water to stay as a gas in that mix without too much difficulty, depending on what temperature you keep your envelope.
Also, there's another issue with using heavier lifting gases like hot air. In general, the lighter your lifting gas, the smaller, more streamlined, and more rigid your envelope. This directly correlates with speed, maneuverability, tolerance of adverse weather conditions, and fuel consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as an international right for asylum in an embassy, except within the confines of Article 14 of the UDHR, which involves only prosecution for political crimes. Rape is not a political crime. The arrest warrant has "rape" checked as the reason.
The UK would close the embassy. It would then be private property without protection, harboring a fugitive. They could turn him over or they could be stormed as any other private property harboring a fugitive would be.
And I let my rapist walk me back to my f***ing car and waited for him while he peed on the street. Have you never heard of "shock" before? Do you have any clue how hard it is to get yourslf to accept the fact that you've been raped? As soon as he left she immediately cleaned up and washed everything in her apartment, especially the semen spot on her bed, after washing herself, and then called her friends, distraught (matching their testimony).
Like most people, I couldn't get myself to file charges. I just wanted to forget about it. I couldn't imagine going through a trial, having to face him more, and all of the smears that I know would have been directed against me for being some "slut trying to ruin an innocent man's life". And he was a nobody, not someone with a legion of millions of global fans. I mean, my god, I've seen websites about these women that are basically stalker sites.
I did nothing. But if I had found out shortly after that he had done the *same sort of thing thing* to another girl right around the same time as what he did to me? I still don't know if I would have filed charges, but it definitely would have changed the picture.
During sleep it's *always* non-consentual. A sleeping person *cannot consent*, period.
You'll need to do more than eat your words. What is the proper way to apologize for smearing rape victims?
Really? Discouraging copycats and preventing the allowance of someone to cheat their way out of the British justice system isn't worth a possible (but improbable) disruption of a piddling amount of trade with a small South-American nation while winning brownie points from Sweden?
People have tried to move people via diplomatic bags before. It's never worked, at least as far as is known (there's one suspected case from Egypt long ago, but it's not really certain). It failed with Mordechai Ben Masoud Louk, it failed with Umaru Dikko, etc. And it especially wouldn't work if you tried it on something as obviously in violation of the Vienna Convention as a car. The British have already made it quite clear that they plan to stop any vehicles leaving the embassy.
Embassies are not magic. Their immunity basically only extends as far as the host state is willing to tolerate them, because ultimately, the host state has all the cards, including the right to expel diplomats and close embassies altogether. The more the embassy tries to f*** with the laws of the host state and cheat the Vienna Convention, the less they tend to be tolerated. And Ecuador already has a less than stellar record with their diplomatic pouches (they got caught using them to smuggle cocaine to Italy once)
If 'by a few weeks community service" you mean "up to four years in prison", yes.
What world do you live on where having sex with a sleeping person (let alone in a manner that you know they'd refuse, which they'd been refusing all night) is a community-service offence?
He's not going to the Pentagon. He's going to Sweden in accordance with the European Arrest Warrant. Where they'll take their time, try him, and convict him, and he'll serve in a Swedish prison. All nice and legal. A few years later when he walks, nobody will care about him anymore.
Just watch.
"Prisoners of war" is totally different from "losing diplomatic immunity". Ecuador countering in kind by closing the British embassy? It'd be tolerated, and pretty much expected. Making *captives* out of the diplomats? Ecuador would find itself with some new craters if they tried that, and the British public would support it. The British aren't exactly flower children when it comes to the use of their military, in case you didn't notice, even when their citizens *aren't* at risk.
"Embassies to militarize"? Really? So embassies are supposed to now try to hold off the *entire armed forces* of their host country?
Let's jump back to reality again, thank you.
And actually, most of the diplomatic world has long been more concerned with the issue of the fact that there's no solid international framework on what to do when people seek to hide out in embassies than the fact that whenever two nations get into a major spat, they usually end up threatening to or even actually revoking each other's embassies at some point.
It really has nothing to do with Assange at this point. It has to do with whether a person can escape the UK justice system. He could be a guy accused of stealing a frozen chicken dinner from the local Iceland, but if he was escaping charges confirmed by their high court and jumping bail and creating an international incident, the *last* thing they want is him to have some sort of successful resolution out of it that will encourage others to likewise try to evade the UK justice system
And, FYI, two courts in the UK found the charges against him credible and that they'd be a violation of UK law if they occurred there.
Really? As if embassies haven't been booted before? As if, for example, Bolivia has been threatening to do the same to the US embassy there for the past several months? Which nobody seems to care about what it does with embassies because it's a small impoverished south-American state oh wait a minute....
Really? So an embassy exists forever? So countries never close other nations' embassies during diplomatic disputes?
Please rejoin us in the real world when you're ready.
I think they'll do it ASAP. The last thing they want is Assange-copycats.
And it definitely has nothing to do with having sex with a sleeping person (in violation of the terms set when they were awake, not like that matters), pinning down another and trying to force her legs open to have sex without a condom, etc. It's all about Assange. It's always all about Assange. After all, he's God. Actually, that's not my favorite of Assange's diary entries; that has to be the one where he says that there will be no great breakthroughs by women in the field of mathematics because " they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world..", but he hopes that a (presumably male) neuroscientist will create a new "female" mathematics for them to help them out.
First off, the parent was talking about any two-bit thug who decides that he wants to evade arrest and so goes into the nearest third-world embassy with a bribe for protection to the ambassador. People seeking asylum in embassies is rare, and governments want to keep it that way. These cases generally also resolve themselves shortly; they are almost never allowed to fester for long periods of time, for precisely the reason that people charged with crimes having a "can't touch me" zone is generally something that states don't like to have.
Secondly, embassies are hosted at the will of the host country. Britain is fully within their rights to close the Ecuadorian embassy. They even have added legal clout, as part of the charter for embassies is that they are to exist only to conduct diplomatic work and not interfere in the legal system of their host countries.
This will all be over soon. At least the "running" part.
Are you going for a new record in "how dense can I pack errors about the assange case"?
1) The checkbox on the arrest warrant for "rape" was marked, and the UK courts found that the charges would be rape even under UK law (most notably, having sex with a person who's asleep, even ignoring that he did so without a condom which had been made clear was a precondition of sex with her - it's *always* illegal)
2) The charges are with penalties of up to four years in prison.
3) He cannot be charged in absentia under Swedish law. There is a series of steps which must be taken in order to lead to formal charges, and not all of them have been taken yet. Hence the warrant to continue the process. The European Arrest Warrant makes it clear that he is to be returned with intent to charge. Which also means it makes no sense to send over Swedish interrogators to the UK - not like anyone should have to give famous people special treatment anyway just because they say to.
Debunked in your other thread.
Challenge accepted.
Here's Ardin's thesis, titled "The Cuban Multi-Party System: Is The Democratic alternative really democratic and an alternative after the Castro regime?" The word rape does not appear in it.
Oh, really, it's time to look at *everything a person has ever written on the internet*, really? Like you've never written anything that others could use to discredit you online, ever? Really? First off, the "seven steps to revenge" 1) was a repost, 2) begins with, basically, "don't", and is 3) in general about how, if you do, how to cause an ex boyfriend's new girlfriend to break up with him.
Secondly, if you want to take the "anything you've ever written", let's see what Assange thinks about women.
Wow, really Julian? You're a freaking God to women? And do we even need to get into his dating profile, Mr. I AM DANGER, ACHTUNG?
See how this "dig up anything a person has ever written" game works?
Wow, what the frick is up with your "one bullet point on a website" link? It's not a reference to anything - nothing is backed up in any way, shape or form - but man, what a stalker site that is.
You need to work on your reading comprehension on the Mundo article you linked. It says she worked as the head of the Swedish group connected to the party, a party based on peaceful civil disobedience. "Somehow" funding it? It says right there - she funded it "minimally" with the magazine Consenso. Nowhere does it say she was deported. That's only said in the counterpunch article, which the article you linked to describes as riddled with errors. And furthermore, in what f-ed up world does supporting democracy in Cuba mean "CIA agent"? I mean, for crying out loud!
The interrogation does not at all say what you nor the person who posted it claim it says. The part about Wilen hearing the news reads as follows:
Amazing how "difficulty concentrating" and concerned that "Assange was angry with her" transforms into "horrified" that they brought charges. I also noted (to put it another way, it made me sick to read) how the person who posted the article tried to spin the following passage as "consent":
One-sentence response: given that approximately 0.002% of UK court cases (at the current going rate) are overturned by the ECRH, how on Earth can you possibly claim that this means that there's even remotely probable odds that a random case is problematic?
There are some cases where lambda-d functions improve clarity. For example, lambdas make for very clear, concise threading of simple tasks using the new C++11 threading operations.
Really, many of the new features play so beautifully together. For example, you can write a simple packet reader/parser which:
* Loops indefinitely
* Waits until data can be read
* Spawns the processing of that data in its own thread and resumes holding and processing packets, while in the spawned thread:
* Proper type of packet is determined
* Appropriate packet object is created
* Packet object processed
* Packet object deallocated
Using code one-liners like:
while (true) { auto PacketData=ReadPacket(); thread([]{ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}).detach(); }
or
while (true) { thread([](auto PacketData){ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}, ReadPacket()).detach(); }
Now, it's stylistically better to spread it out over a couple lines, and the above assumes that you're "using" std, have written your packet factory and socket reader, etc. However, it gives you an idea of how powerful the new features are. In normal code I'd probably write something like:
while (true)
{
std::string PacketData(ReadPacket());
std::thread([]{ MyPacketFactory(PacketData)->RunPacket();}).detach();
}
Again, to reiterate, this is just from memory; I've not tried to compile these.
Nothing is infallable in this world. Nothing is perfect. But it's hard to beat "one of the best records in the EHCR".
And? What, you expect courts to hear cases that it finds *not* credible? Look at the percentages of cases in the EHCR. Turkey and Russia have big human rights problems in their judicial systems. The UK does not. The statistics bear this out. I'm sorry that you don't like this fact, but it's what the numbers say.
So is the concept that the Earth isn't flat, but that won't stop me from traveling internationally. The argument "It must be 100% perfection or else people I like shouldn't have to face trial" is about as absurd as you can get.
Is your argument honestly that because some tiny fraction of cases in Britain are brought to the ECHR, and of those, only one-in-200 is found credible, that therefore the British court system can't be trusted? I mean, *really*? Turkey and Russia alone split nearly half of the negative judgements by the EHCR. The UK barely even makes the list.
Linguistics. "Accusations", is that better? He can't be formally charged in Sweden in absentia. The checkbox for "rape" was listed on the European Arrest Warrant anyway.
You're grossly misunderstanding how these things work. Assange is not a diplomat. He has no immunity. He can't be given immunity because immunity must be conferred by a host country. There is no right preventing a diplomatic vehicle from being stopped. There is no magic get-out-of-jail card here, as much as you want there to be one. There's just a weird little loophole that as long as he's in an embassy building, he's safe. At least, temporarily. Because there's also no reason Britain can't decide to close the Ecuadorian embassy at will as punishment for violating their justice system. Whose opinion do you think the UK cares about more, the US's and Sweden's, or Ecuador's? Not to mention that there may be perfectly legal ways to force Ecuador to evict him, since embassies are required to only do business related to their charter and not interfere with the justice systems of their host countries. Really, the immunity of embassies is only as good as how afraid you are of annoying the sending state.
And, FYI, there is no international "right to asylum". Most South American states recognize one, but the rest of the world does not.
Lift ratio of hot air really sucks, though. Steam can get you a much better lift ratio without having to use He or H2, but it's a pain to work with (it tends to condense on the skin, even if insulated, leaving streams of water that need to be collected and which can try to form puddles on the skin and all sorts of other problems). Ammonia works, but lift ratio is worse than steam and it's of course highly toxic in quantities like that. Methane works, but is also flammable, and if you're going for flammable, why not H2, which is a many times better lifting gas? N2 is an inert lifting gas, but only baaaaarely. Neon is better, but very rare. And there are a few even more ridiculous options for things that work as lifting gases on earth, like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide and hydrogen fluoride and diborane, which we can rule out immediately. And do we really need to go all sci-fi with the plasma balloon or vacuum balloon concepts? ;)
Probably the best "inert" mix you can get while minimizing helium consumption is about 90-91% helium, 7.5% hydrogen, and 1.5-2.5% water vapor. Hydrogen in those quantities cannot hold a sustained burn in the case of a leak (7.5% H2 in air burns, but by the time enough oxygen is mixed into a H2/He mix, the H2 ratio is too low), and you can get about that much water to stay as a gas in that mix without too much difficulty, depending on what temperature you keep your envelope.
Also, there's another issue with using heavier lifting gases like hot air. In general, the lighter your lifting gas, the smaller, more streamlined, and more rigid your envelope. This directly correlates with speed, maneuverability, tolerance of adverse weather conditions, and fuel consumption.