Asylum is widely associated with humanitarian norms and domestic laws in liberal democracies. Reflecting this assumption, systematic information on the evolution of asylum provisions in national constitutions remains limited, and comparative analyses of the motives behind the legal codification of refugee protection in autocracies are even scarcer. This research note addresses these gaps by introducing the Constitutional Asylum (COAS) dataset, which captures asylum provisions in the constitutions of all 193 UN member states from 1789 to 2023. The findings challenge conventional wisdom, revealing that autocracies, not democracies, have been the main adopters of constitutional asylum. While both regime types have used constitutional asylum to spread ideologies abroad, autocracies have done so more extensively and additionally leveraged it to strengthen presidential power. These results show that asylum is not merely a humanitarian norm but also a strategic instrument of statecraft, used to consolidate power within states and advance geopolitical agendas abroad.