PLEASE PARTICIPATE IN THIS IMPORTANT ACTION & GET THE WORD OUT. MY COLLEAGUE AND FRIEND, SUSANNE CARDONA, German Coalitions to Abolish the Death Penalty, sent this. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
NOTE: Please be aware that there may be some complications with this due to the duplicity and hidden nature generally of the present US administration & regime, ie, signing statements, ulterior motives in wanting to reduce any states rights. Watch for further items on this. Even so, the Vienna Convention and other rights protections may help the US and foreign visitors anywhere in the world if they are increased and established. Please send any further information you have on these matters to Connie L. Nash newlease7@yahoo.com and watch often Bill of Rights Defense Committee at http://www.bordc.org/news/” and http://www.bordc.org/”. Also of course, Amnesty International, Center for Constitutional Rights.
Text was edited by Mark Warren. For those of you who might not know him: Mark’s a legal researcher who specializes in the application of consular treaty rights to death penalty cases. He was a member of Mexico's legal team at the ICJ in the Avena case and helped to draft several of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in Medellin.
(edited 4/1/08)
Dear friends,
In its ruling on March 23, a majority of Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the case Medellin v. Texas that a binding decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requiring judicial remedies for consular rights violations in the USA is not enforceable in the domestic courts. Although issued under the authority of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the ICJ Statute and the UN Charter, the ICJ decision in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals is not enforceable domestically because the authorizing treaties had not been transformed into domestic law by Congress (even though each treaty was signed by the US and ratified by the Senate).
As a result of this failure to enforce binding treaty obligations, U.S. citizens abroad may be deprived of access to consular assistance upon arrest. Read the Dallas Morning News editorial:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/editorials/stories/DN-scotus_27edi.ART.State.Edition1.161c416.html
There is a solution: The US Congress needs to adopt the ICJ decision in the Avena Case as domestic law.
In order to achieve this we kindly ask you to join our appeal. We have drafted an open letter to the US Congress (see below.) Please copy this letter and also write letters yourselves. We are looking for support from both individuals and groups. Please spread this request for appeal widely.
The idea is for lots of letters to arrive within a relatively short period of time as opposed to never-ending chain letters on the internet. Therefore, we are setting an appeal time limit of April 20, 2008. Please do not send letters after that date.
Our goal is to really make it happen, and for the Congress (both the Senate and the House of Representatives) to take note of this appeal we seek for not only hundreds but thousands of letters to arrive within a short period of time. So please spread this appeal widely!
This issue is not restricted to capital punishment cases and therefore we are addressing all groups that may wish to support our goal, not only human rights activists but also NGOs, organizations and associations of all kinds such as religious communities, sports clubs etc.
Organizations please write to:
- the members of the House of Representatives, and the senators – in both cases you may send one letter to all members using the below addresses or even send a letter to each individual member, which of course is much more work but may be more effective, too.
- a copy to the Secretary of State or Minister of Foreign Affairs of your own country (for German groups the German foreign minister's address is given below)
- a copy to the ambassador of the United States in your country (address for Germany see below)
- a copy to the most important U.S. media
- a copy to the most important media in your respective countries.
Individuals please write to:
- one letter each to (I) the members of the House of Representatives to (II) the members of the Senate (addresses see below)
- - a copy to the Secretary of State or Minister of Foreign Affairs of your own country (for Germans the German foreign minister's address is given below)
- a copy to the ambassador of the United States in your country (For Germans the address for Germany see below)
- the following applies to US citizens: a copy to your Congressman (link for names and addresses see below)
You will find addresses and an example for your letter below. Please feel free to write a letter in your own words.
Thank you for your participation!
Susanne Cardona
Initiative gegen die Todesstrafe e.V.
German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
www. Initiative-gegen-die-Todesstrafe.de
Text of the open letter of the German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty:
Dear Members of Congress,
The U.S. Supreme Court's recent disposition of the case of Medellin v. Texas raises serious concerns, both for foreign nationals in the United States and for the treatment of U.S. citizens abroad. The Court has declared that the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals (Mexico v. United States) is not binding under domestic law, despite the U.S. Senate's full ratification of the treaties conferring jurisdiction on the ICJ in that case, and despite an order by President Bush urging state court compliance with the Avena Judgment.
Addressing claims brought by Mexico under a compulsory dispute settlement mechanism agreed to by the United States, the ICJ found that the U.S. had violated its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations in the cases of 51 death-sentenced Mexican nationals by failing to advise them of their consular notification rights after their arrests. The ICJ held that the necessary remedy is for the domestic courts to provide "review and reconsideration" in each case, in order to determine if the lack of prompt access to consular assistance was harmful to any of the defendants. State rules of procedure may not be applied to prevent the "review and reconsideration" of these convictions and sentences, since the Vienna Convention requires that local laws and regulations must give "full effect" to the consular rights that the treaty confers. As the Supreme Court recognized, U.S. compliance with the Avena Judgment is a binding obligation under international law.
However, by concluding that the ICJ Judgment is not enforceable domestically, the Medellin decision leaves the United States in violation of its binding treaty obligations but without any prospect of remedies from the judicial or the executive branches. This unacceptable situation may prompt police departments nationwide to ignore the Vienna Convention's consular information and notification requirements for foreign detainees, as happened in the cases of José Ernesto Medellín and the fifty other Mexican nationals whose Avena claims were disposed of in the Medellin decision. Foreign nationals arrested on serious charges must be able to count on the prompt access to consular notification and assistance that the Vienna Convention guarantees, a protection that in many cases is as essential to a fair trial as the right to counsel.
In addition, as the dissenting Justices observed, failing to comply with the United States' binding treaty commitments runs the risk of "precipitating actions by other nations putting at risk American citizens who have the misfortune to be arrested while traveling abroad, or of diminishing our Nation’s reputation abroad as a result of our failure to follow the ‘rule of law’ principles that we preach.”
The Medellin decision's pick-and-choose approach to treaty compliance raises a serious question for the international community: is the United States bound by its word, or not? Are the nations of the world expected to retain constitutional scholars to determine if and when a proposed treaty will bind the United States? Or can other nations presume that when the United States of America signs a treaty through its authorized representative, and ratifies it through the U.S. Senate, that treaty will be worth the paper on which it is printed?
There is a solution. The Supreme Court has laid the responsibility for America's credibility in the world squarely on the shoulders of the Congress of the United States. The U.S. Congress has the power -- and the moral obligation -- to adopt the ICJ judgment on Vienna Convention remedies as domestic law.
We urge Congress to implement the limited and reasonable remedies required under the ICJ Judgment in Avena and Other Mexican Nationals, thus assuring the world that a promise made by the United States is a promise kept.
The undersigned,
Addresses of the US Congress (two separate letters will have to be sent):
Members of the United States Senate
Senate Office Building
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
And
Members of the House of Representatives
House Office Building
United States House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20510
The names of the senators and members of the House of Representatives can be found at:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
and
http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW.shtml
1 comment:
Dear friends,
Today I received these important comments from Mark Warren . Therefore the text of the letters to the US-congress definitely has to get changed.
For those of you who are able to change the text of the letter according to Mark’s comments, please do so, for others please wait with mailing out anything and an edited text for the letter will follow tomorrow. If you are writing your own text please also keep in mind the things Mark mentions here.
Thank you,
Susanne
Comments on “Open letter to US-Congress….” by Mark:
Susanne, thank you for forwarding this important initiative to me. It's important to understand, though, that the Supreme Court's decision was confined to whether or not the VCCR Optional Protocol and other treaties granting jurisdiction to the ICJ were enforceable through the domestic courts without implementing legislation ("self-executing"). Despite what the media has widely reported, the Court emphatically stated that it was not ruling on whether the Vienna Convention itself is directly enforceable in the domestic courts, or whether it confers individual rights (see footnote 4):
The question is whether the Avena judgment has binding effect in domestic courts under the Optional Protocol, ICJ Statute, and U. N. Charter. Consequently, it is unnecessary to resolve whether the Vienna Convention is itself “self-executing” or whether it grants Medellín individually enforceable rights. See Reply Brief for Petitioner 5 (disclaiming reliance on the Vienna Convention). As in Sanchez- Llamas, 548 U. S., at 342–343, we thus assume, without deciding, that Article 36 grants foreign nationals “an individually enforceable right to request that their consular officers be notified of their detention, and an accompanying right to be informed by authorities of the availability of consular notification.”
In other words, the question decided by the Supreme Court in Medellin addressed only the direct enforceability of the remedy of judicial "review and reconsideration" contained in the ICJ's Avena Judgment, and not the much broader question of the Vienna Convention as a source of rights and remedies enforceable in the domestic courts. The Court's answer was that only Congress has the authority to implement the Avena Judgment. It is this response that should be addressed, rather than seeking legislative action on the VCCR itself--which everyone seems to agree is a self-executing treaty.
Congressional legislation adopting the VCCR as federal law would not implement the Avena Judgment, and would not benefit the 43 Mexican nationals still on death row whose cases were addressed by the ICJ.
regards, Mark
---
Note from Connie:
Also, keep watching for more items to come on this regarding the complications I had referred to earlier & which Susanne mentions here on this first comment. Also keep checking on Bush/State Rights by search engine and watching at
http://www.bordc.org Once there is a definitive action, we will probably post it as a completely new blog.
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