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Originally Posted by baddog
I forgot, if someone alleges something, it must be true.
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Read. The. Damn. Article.
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President Bush accepted the judgment and asked state courts to review the cases.
Texas refused, and the issue went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled last March by a 6-3 vote that Bush lacked the authority to compel state courts to comply with the judgment from The Hague. The Vienna Convention cannot be binding on the states unless Congress enacts legislation enforcing it as federal law, the Supreme Court said.
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The problem here should be obvious. States deciding that they don't have to honor the country's international treaties.
Now, I'm sure that to many Americans, that sounds just fine and dandy. There's one minor problem with it: if the US stops honoring treaties with other countries, other countries will stop honoring treaties with the US. In this particular case, it could mean that other countries would stop allowing US citizens access to consular advice when accused of committing a crime.
In case you still don't get it: it would mean that American citizens could be tried in severely corrupt countries without being allowed contact with the local representatives of the local government. In other words, it would mean that there's a really big fucking chance of innocent Americans getting fucked over in certain particularly corrupt countries.
It should be quite obvious that the Mexican government isn't asking for the death sentences to be commuted to life sentences, but rather to postpone the executions until it has been decided whether the trials in question should be reviewed, and if so, to postpone executions until that has been done.
Why the fuck is it that Americans feel that being the world's current only superpower is a good reason to behave like a rogue state?