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US withdraws from another international agreement on human rights
U.S. Quits Agreement on Access to Diplomats
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has withdrawn from an international agreement that guarantees jailed foreigners the right to talk to consular officers, a protocol that has been used by opponents of capital punishment, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice notified U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a letter dated March 7, that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the newspaper reported.
In recent years, other countries with support from U.S. death penalty opponents have successfully complained before the World Court that their citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving access to diplomats from their home countries.
A State Department spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the report.
The optional protocol gives the World Court, which is also known as the International Court of Justice, the final word when detainees say they have been denied the right to see a home-country diplomat.
President Bush agreed in late February to comply with a year-old World Court decision that the United States should review the cases of 51 Mexican death row inmates because U.S. officials failed to tell them of their right to speak to consular officers right after their arrests.
The U.S. government previously left it up to the states to decide what to do in the cases of the 51 Mexicans.
A State Department spokeswoman told The Washington Post that withdrawal from the Vienna Convention protocol was a way of protecting against future World Court rulings that disrupt the U.S. domestic criminal system.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on March 28 in the case of Mexican Jose Medellin who was convicted of murder during a sexual assault and sentenced to death in 1994 in Texas. His case has drawn wide attention in Mexico, where Secretary of State Rice meets on Thursday with Mexican President Vicente Fox.
SOURCE
Reuters, "U.S. Quits Agreement on Access to Diplomats -- Paper", 10 March 2005.
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7859607
"The Insider" mailing list article, 11 March 2005.
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