Legal News

Texas Defies Bush, International Law; ICJ?s Credibility in Jeopardy

By Dan Slater

Next Tuesday could be a big day in the world of international law. That’s the day the state of Texas is scheduled to execute José Medellín (pictured), a Mexican national who in 1994 was convicted of participating in the rape and murder of two teenagers in Houston. But a host of constituencies — including members of Congress, the Mexican government, the International Court of Justice and the Bush Administration — hopes Texas holds off. (Here’s a story by our very own Ashby Jones. Here’s a blog post on the case from last month.)

In 2003, years after Medellín’s crime, Mexico filed a suit with the ICJ on behalf of Medellín and 53 other Mexican nationals on death row in the U.S. Mexico argued the U.S. had failed to notify the nationals that they were allowed to reach out to a Mexican consulate, a right guaranteed them by a multinational treaty called the Vienna Convention. The following year, the ICJ ordered the U.S. to hold a judicial hearing for nearly all of the nationals over whether the violations had compromised their trials.

The Bush administration backed the ruling and ordered the states to hold hearings. Why, you might ask? The administration cited the need to ensure that the Vienna Convention’s safeguards, like “consular notification,” would continue to apply reciprocally to U.S. citizens abroad.

But Texas courts were defiant, shooting down Bush’s order, ruling that the administration was powerless to force the state to follow an ICJ ruling. In March of this year, the Supreme Court sided with Texas.

Texas has the power to end the flap, at least in the short term, by postponing the execution and providing Medellín “review and reconsideration,” as ordered by the ICJ. But it seems unlikely. “Mr. Medellín gang-raped and murdered two teenagers,” said Allison Castle, a spokeswoman for Texas Governor Rick Perry. “We welcome foreign visitors, but for those who come here with the intent to do harm, there are going to be consequences.”

To Ed Swaine, a law professor at George Washington University in Washington, an execution Tuesday would reverberate throughout the international-law community. “It will diminish the ICJ’s credibility and lessen the incentive for countries to bring cases to the ICJ in the first place,” he says. “This will be a very big deal.”

Find a link to Medellin’s stay application at Scotus blog.

Photo: AP

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 01, 2008 (boomark / email).