Posted on 02/05/2003 1:14:48 PM PST by kattracks
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The World Court ordered the United States Wednesday to stay executions of three Mexicans -- two on death row in President Bush's state of Texas -- and reserved the right to intervene in dozens more cases.
Mexico took Washington to the International Court of Justice at the Hague last month, saying more than 50 of its nationals on death row should get retrials because U.S. authorities breached an international treaty by failing to tell them of their rights to consular help after their arrests.
With the whole case likely to be lengthy, Mexico asked the highest U.N. court to instruct urgent stays of execution for 51 men. Judges ruled that just three were at imminent risk, though said it might order similar stays for others "if appropriate" before issuing its final judgment in the proceedings.
Mexico's court action reflects deep disquiet among some of Washington's closest allies over capital punishment, which has led to protests from leading European states and Pope John Paul.
The United States and Japan are the only rich industrialized nations to execute convicted criminals. The last person executed in the European Union was guillotined in France in 1977.
The case is the highest level bout of a long-running fight between the United States and its poorer southern neighbor over the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
The international treaty obliges local authorities to inform an arrested person without delay of his right to speak to consular officials from his country.
"I wouldn't look at it as a defeat or a victory," U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands Clifford Sobel told Reuters after the decision. "The order clearly does not address the merits of the case."
TWO DECADES ON DEATH ROW
Mexico wants retrials for all its 54 nationals -- four of them mentally ill or retarded -- who were sentenced to death in 10 states in the United States. Three of the 54 were condemned in Illinois, however, where the state governor last month commuted all death sentences in his state.
"The United States of America must take all measures necessary to ensure Mr. Cesar Roberto Fierro Reyna, Mr. Roberto Moreno Ramos and Mr. Osvaldo Torres Aguilera are not executed pending final judgment in these proceedings," Court President Gilbert Guillaume said in the binding order Wednesday.
The three men -- two of whom were being held in Texas and the third in Oklahoma -- "are at risk of execution in the coming months or possibly even weeks," Guillaume said.
Fierro Reyna has been on death row since 1980.
"The decision is welcome, certainly. It comes in the line we have asked for and it certainly reinforces international law," said Santiago Onate, Mexico's ambassador to the Netherlands.
"We are looking for full redress. That we haven't had now. What we have now is...an order from the court that will prevent any execution until the court decides on the merits," Onate told reporters after the sitting.
The United States argued that Mexico neither proved its rights under the Vienna Convention were harmed nor that there was an urgent need for the emergency injunction.
Such an injunction would interfere with the United States' sovereign right to administer its criminal justice system and would mark an unwarranted intrusion by the court into U.S. affairs, it argued at a World Court hearing on January 21.
The US Constitution never gave foreign or world governments authority over any of the individual states. The US government cannot make treaties that take the states' authority from them without breaking the Constitution. The Constitution actually was written to limit the federal government, certainly our Founding Fathers did not mean us to be placed under a world government that would override state's rights. The corrupt Mexican government is trying to destroy our sovereignty ----this isn't about protecting their citizens ---how many Mexican journalists have been executed in the past few years? There are blood baths going on in Mexico ---you'd think that government has enough to worry about.
It'll make it more hygenic shipping them back to Chiapas as well.
It strikes me that Bush's strategy of placating the UN by going through the motions (hoops) of getting UN permission while he gets ready to depose Hussein has now been interpreted as weakness by some.
Personally, I think the executions will have to occur, or we will set a precedent of allowing the world court to intervene in our internal courts. Should that happen, I think we know it time to get ready.
You can't hold out on Galveston forever.
Don't have to. Just until the Yankee leadership in Washington, New York and the Left Coast get tired of losing their cannon fodder from *flyover country* and the results begin to affect their own lives. Then they'll quit first. They're riddled with indecisiveness and treason anyway, the reason most Texans and others hold such contempt for them as is now.
The Constitution is the supreme law of these United States. If you don't like it tough.
Right up until the government abrogates that constitution or dissolves it by unconstitutional acts, such as Second Amendment or other constitutional violations, rendering the entire document and the laws derived from it morally and legally bankrupt and fraudulent and thereby no longer meaningful. Or, so far as that goes, by annexing a state by military conquest rather than by congressional action, such as the military occupation and annexation of Texas in 1965.
Be careful of that for which you wish. It may come true.
-archy-/-
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