Mexicans on Death Row to Get Hearings

The Bush administration has announced that it will attempt to defuse a long-simmering international dispute over the death penalty by instructing Texas state courts to give 51 Mexicans facing the death penalty new hearings on their claims that they were denied meetings with diplomats from their nation, in violation of international law. In a Feb. 28 brief filed with the Supreme Court, the administration said the United States would bow to a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, also known as the World Court, which found that Texas officials violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by not providing the Mexicans with consular access. That treaty, ratified by the United States in 1969, provides that "consular officers shall have the right to visit a national of the sending State who is in prison, custody or detention, to converse and correspond with him and to arrange for his legal representation." The situation of Mexicans facing capital punishment in Texas has been a sore point in relations between Washington and Mexico City. Mexico argues that its citizens would fare better in Texas courts if they got aid from home-country diplomats. The consular-access issue has also flared between the United States and its European allies, who are generally critical of the death penalty, especially in Bush's home state. Germany pressed and won a World Court case in 2001 over a German national who faced a capital trial in Arizona without consular access. More broadly, the United States has been under fire in international forums for the Bush administration's perceived refusal to adhere to international legal norms in such places as the prison for accused terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [more]