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WASHINGTON — President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered a Texas court to grant a new hearing to a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday. In a case that mixes presidential power, international relations and the death penalty, the court sided with Texas 6-3. Bush was in the unusual position of siding with death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty. An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death...

This is very good news. Congrats to the state of Texas, which had to fight the open-borders lobby and the Bush administration all the way to the high court to prevent international law from superseding American sovereignty: President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered a Texas court to grant a new hearing to a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday. In a case that mixes presidential power, international relations and the death penalty, the court sided with Texas 6-3. Bush was in the unusual position of siding with death row prisoner Jose...

WASHINGTON - President Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered a Texas court to reopen the case of a Mexican on death row for rape and murder, the Supreme Court said Tuesday. In a case that mixes presidential power, international relations and the death penalty, the court sided with Texas 6-3. Bush was in the unusual position of siding with death row prisoner Jose Ernesto Medellin, a Mexican citizen whom police prevented from consulting with Mexican diplomats, as provided by international treaty. An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexicans on death row...

The State Department's top legal adviser told international lawyers on June 6 that President Bush is so committed to the primacy of international law that he has taken his home state of Texas to court on behalf of a group of Mexican killers. The Mexicans had been sentenced to death for murdering U.S. citizens, including young children. John B. Bellinger III, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited the case, Mexico v. United States of America, in trying to convince the attorneys that the administration is doing what it can to enforce international law in U.S. courts. In...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - The United Nations' highest court on Monday exonerated Serbia of direct responsibility for genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s, but ruled that it failed to prevent the slaughter of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica. The International Court of Justice said Serbia also failed to comply with its obligations to punish those who carried out the genocide after the Bosnian Serb army captured the U.N. enclave in July 1995, and ordered Serbia to hand over suspects for trial by a separate U.N. court. It specifically demanded that Serbia hand over Gen. Ratko Mladic, the general who oversaw...

Texas can proceed with the execution of a death row inmate notwithstanding a ruling by an international tribunal and a memorandum from President Bush directing state courts to comply with the tribunal’s decision, Texas’ highest court for criminal matters ruled yesterday. “We hold that the president has exceeded his constitutional authority by intruding into the independent powers of the judiciary,” Judge Michael Keasler wrote for the court, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The case, which has been considered by the United States Supreme Court, appears quite likely to return there. In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The...

The first trial of a state charged with genocide has opened in The Hague, where Bosnia-Hercegovina will accuse Serbia and Montenegro of war crimes. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is hearing the case, which Bosnia first brought 13 years ago. It says Belgrade was responsible for crimes of genocide on its territory during the early 1990s Bosnian war. Belgrade denies its intention was to wipe out Muslims in eastern Bosnia and says there is no proof of the claims.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Generals and politicians have been convicted of genocide, but the UN's highest court will consider Monday whether a country - in this case Serbia - can be guilty of humanity's worst crime. The stakes potentially include billions of dollars and history's judgment. Thirteen years after Bosnia filed the case with the International Court of Justice, its lawyers will lay out their lawsuit against Serbia and Montenegro - the successor state for the defunct Yugoslavia - charging it with a premeditated attempt to destroy Bosnia's Muslim population, in whole or part. "Not since the end...

The High Court of Justice recently ruled that the separation barrier built to protect Israelis against Palestinian terrorist attacks was morally justified as well as legal. While ordering some changes in the routing to limit the impact on Palestinians, the Israeli court rejected the International Court of Justice's advisory opinion, which called the barrier illegal. The ICJ's majority had erased the context of terrorism, and focused exclusively on distorted political claims related to the legal status of “occupied territory.” Judge Aharon Barak and his colleagues rebuked the ICJ, but could not yet bring themselves to state that international law has...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court will consider today whether American courts are bound by the decisions of the International Court of Justice, a tribunal created by the United Nations and based in The Hague. Senator Cornyn, a Republican of Texas, cited today's case as one impetus for the introduction last week of a resolution in the Senate that would instruct federal courts to avoid looking to international and foreign law when interpreting the federal Constitution. Mr. Cornyn filed one of many friend-of-the court briefs in the case, arguing that the Constitution reserves the power of judicial review to federal judges,...

The Bush administration has decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said yesterday. In a two-paragraph letter dated March 7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The United States proposed the protocol in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969. The protocol requires signatories to let...

Prompted by an international tribunal's decision last year ordering new hearings for 51 Mexicans on death rows in the United States, the State Department said yesterday that the United States had withdrawn from the protocol that gave the tribunal jurisdiction to hear such disputes. The withdrawal followed a Feb. 28 memorandum from President Bush to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales directing state courts to abide by the decision of the tribunal, the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The decision required American courts to grant "review and reconsideration" to claims that the inmates' cases had been hurt by the...

It's time the media and the world face the facts, set the record straight and tell the truth. United Nations corruption favors and includes an anti-Israel bias. This is why I propose renaming the morally and politically bankrupt organization a more accurate and honest moniker. Let's call it what it is. The United Nations Against Israel (U.N.A.I). The U.N.A.I is an international forum dedicated to Israel-bashing and Israel-smashing. Various and sundry branches of the United Nations Against Israel have consistently and continually endorsed Arab "Palestinian" attacks against Israel (or in U.N.A.I terminology, the use of "available means, including armed struggle"...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR In its final decision of the year, the International Court of Justice in The Hague decided that it had no jurisdiction to determine whether Serbia and Montenegro had a valid legal claim against NATO countries that participated in the intervention in Kosovo in 1999. While few people outside of Belgrade probably paid much attention, it the decision was symbolically very important: it demonstrated just how incapable the court is of resolving disputes, and what little hope the new International Criminal Court has to do much better. First, there is no doubt that, in strictly legal terms, NATO's intervention...

On July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel's security barrier was a violation of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Eleven days later, the United Nations General Assembly voted 150-6 to condemn Israel and demand removal of the barrier. All twenty-five members of the European Union supported the motion.[1] The EU position would not have been so offensive had it not then undertaken an act of stunning hypocrisy. In August 2004, the EU put out tenders for companies to construct a European separation fence to prevent migration into the EU from countries excluded from...

This article was originally posted on 27 Jul 04, but considering today's UN vote regarding Israel as well as Kerry's "Global Test", this article takes on new importance. The positions taken by our so-called "allies" become far more clear after reading this, and the complete folly of what Kerry is spewing becomes even more infuriating. He has sided with our mortal enemies (yes, I know that we already knew that, this merely reinforces that conclusion). 27 Jul 04: Last Tuesday, the 25 nations of the European Union (EU) voted unanimously to support a United Nations Resolution condemning Israel’s defensive fence...

EU to build wall after blasting Israel'sWorldNetDaily.com-- (08/17/04)   'European hypocrisy is as rank as it is blatant'Just one month after the U.N. and EU launched a furious campaign against Israel's security fence, culminating in the International Court of Justice ruling that the fence is illegal, the EU announced it's planning to build a separation fence of its own, and invited Israel to participate in the construction. The fence is being built to separate recently added EU members Poland and Hungary from their new neighbors – Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The EU said the fence is necessary to "prevent the...

The world terror supporters' club, aka the UN, has told Israel to tear down its security barrier. This follows the ruling by the terror court, the ICJ, that the barrier is illegal (see below). Neither of these decisions is binding, but they are intended to build up the global demonisation of Israel as a pariah state, the necessary prelude to its destruction. Meanwhile, in the US where Christian support for Israel is so strong, the General Asssembly of the Presbyterian Church has equated Israel with apartheid South Africa and called for universal divestment from it. These developments all signal a...

Violent protests against corruption and nepotism in Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and the threatened resignation of his prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, have forced Mr Arafat to back off from putting a relative in charge of Gaza’s security forces... Arafat is feeling the wrath of his own people, who have become increasingly frustrated at the corruption, nepotism and sheer uselessness of his crumbling regime.... Arafat has for months been resisting pressure from America, Egypt, the United Nations and other powers to merge and revamp the PA’s 12 overlapping, ineffectual and mutually hostile security forces, and to put them under the...

With the US standing firmly behind Israel, and the Arab world united against it, the UN General Assembly debated the security fence's legitimacy Friday. The debate was held under the banner, "Israel's illegal actions in East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories." Amongst the speakers at Friday's debate are Palestinian envoy to the UN Nasser al-Kidwa, and Israel's Ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman. First to speak was al-Kidwa. Al-Kidwa, the Palestinian U.N. observer, informed the U.N. General Assembly that the Palestinians may seek a follow-up to the International Court of Justice advisory opinion a week ago...