US Drops Foreign Prisoner Treaty: No Access to Consulate if Arrested

THE United States has withdrawn from an accord that lets an international court settle disputes over foreign inmates, it was announced yesterday.
The decision followed an International Court of Justice ruling last year that ordered new hearings for 51 Mexican death-row inmates because US authorities did not tell them that they could consult diplomats from their own country immediately after their arrests.

It was confirmed just 24 hours after President Bush unexpectedly announced that the US would comply with the court’s ruling to order new hearings for the inmates.

The decision caused anger in Mexico on the day that Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, arrived on an official visit and was condemned by human rights advocates.

“I think it is deplorable,” Frederic Kirgis, a law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said. “It is another step away from US participation in international law and international affairs.”

Dr Rice informed Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, of the decision in a terse letter dated March 7. It said that the US “hereby withdraws” from an optional treaty, attached to the Vienna Convention of 1963, that recognised the right of the International Court of Justice to rule in disputes between countries over consular access to foreign nationals imprisoned abroad.

Yesterday’s decision has no impact on the Mexicans, whose cases are likely to be reviewed by courts in Texas, California and elsewhere to establish whether the failure to put them in touch with a Mexican official affected their fate. Their convictions are unlikely to be overturned. The US was originally the leading advocate of the protocol, as it is known, as it sought to protect its citizens abroad. The US was the first to benefit from the pact, when it successfully sued Iran in The Hague over the American hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979.

However, in recent years the US has been sued under the protocol by Paraguay, Germany and now Mexico. The countries complained that, in defence of the convention, they had not been informed that their citizens were arrested.

The State Department said that defendants could count on “extensive” judicial review in the US, especially in death penalty cases.