Legal News

World Court Rebukes U.S. (Again) Over Mexican Death-Row Inmates

By Ashby Jones

Remember José Medellín (pictured)? He was the Mexican national convicted in Texas of murder in the 1990s and executed last year, over the objections of the International Court of Justice. The Hague-based court had called for additional judicial hearings to be held to weigh whether Medellín was entitled to a new trial or other relief because local police failed to provide him consular access after arrest, as required by a 1963 treaty.

Yesterday, the Medellín situation was back in the news. A United Nations court reiterated its 2004 ruling that the U.S. must provide new hearings for nearly 50 Mexicans in Medellín’s situation before he was executed: those sent to American death rows without receiving consular access. Click here for the story, from the WSJ’s Jess Bravin; click here and here for previous blog coverage on issues surrounding the Medellín situation.

The ruling highlights a perennial irritant between Washington and foreign governments that Obama will be forced to address: the spotty compliance by U.S. state and local authorities with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which provides that arrested aliens have access to diplomats from their home country and which the U.S. ratified in 1969.

The U.S. insists that foreign countries afford Vienna Convention privileges to Americans in trouble overseas. But both the Clinton and Bush administrations had argued that they were powerless to force states to comply with the treaty, when it came to the latter’s handling of foreign nationals. In a ruling last year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that argument, ruling that only an act of Congress could bind the states to rulings made on treaties by international courts.

Will the ICJ’s ruling have any teeth? It’s hard to tell: the court, which serves as the U.N.’s principal judicial body, hears disputes between governments. Its decisions can be enforced only by a vote of the Security Council, however, where the U.S. holds a veto.

In its Monday ruling, the world court noted that the Bush administration had taken efforts to comply with the ruling, albeit unsuccessfully. “It’s underappreciated in the international community and among those who believe this [Bush] administration is not committed to international law, just how hard we worked to comply with the ICJ’s ruling,” said John Bellinger, the departing administration’s chief State Department Lawyer. With the issue unresolved, “it will be an early international law challenge for the new administration to comply with our obligation.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 20, 2009 (boomark / email).