U.S. Withdraws from Vienna Convention Death Penalty Protocol
You had to know something was up when President Bush agreed to give the 51 Mexican death row inmates in the U.S. new hearings, as ordered by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Now, his purpose becomes a little clearer. Wednesday, the U.S. officially withdrew from the Vienna Convention protocol it proposed and ratified in 1963:
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 provided that its signatories would grant the International Court of Justice (ICJ) the last word when their citizens raised a claim of being illegally deprived of the right to meet with a diplomat of their home country when jailed abroad.
The Administration has provided this reason for its decision:
"The International Court of Justice has interpreted the Vienna Consular Convention in ways that we had not anticipated that involved state criminal prosecutions and the death penalty, effectively asking the court to supervise our domestic criminal system," State Department spokeswoman Darla Jordan said yesterday.
Withdrawal from the protocol is a way of "protecting against future International Court of Justice judgments that might similarly interpret the consular convention or disrupt our domestic criminal system in ways we did not anticipate when we joined the convention," Jordan added.
Background on the Mexican cases is here.
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