NWV News -- President Bush Seeks UN Jurisdiction Over USA

PRESIDENT BUSH SEEKS UN JURISDICTION OVER USA

By Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
November 3, 2007
NewsWithViews.com

In several speeches he gave across the country, former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton revealed that the President George W. Bush and his administration are buckling under pressure from this nation's Internationalists in the current controversy over Mexico and the International Court of Justice.

The Mexican government is attempting to save an illegal alien convicted of participating in the savage rape and murder of two teenage girls from being executed in Texas for his crimes.

Death penalty opponents in both the US and Mexico are trying to place this nation under the control of a world court, according to critics of the Bush White House.

"[President George Bush's position is] a bad mistake, but one of many mistakes, I'm sad to say, the administration has made recently," Bolton told syndicated radio talk show host Laura Ingraham.

Bolton believes that President Bush is helping Mexico and the International Court block the death sentence for a Mexican rapist-murderer. He called Bush's actions "ridiculous."

"Bolton is a true patriot. That's why the liberals in the Democrat Party and the phony conservatives in the GOP were so eager to remove him from his seat at the UN. Bolton believes the UN is corrupt and he's opposed to placing the United States under the jurisdiction of any international entity," claims conservative political consultant Michael Baker.

"When it comes to US sovereignty, Americans would be better served listening to Ambassador Bolton rather than our 'closet Internationalist' President," he added.

Baker points to phony conservatives such as Ohio's Senator George Voinovich who shed tears during Senate confirmation hearings for Bolton to serve at the United Nations. "Voinovich feared Bolton's anti-UN positions would hamper US involvement in the New World Order," claims Baker.

In early October, the US Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the impending execution of Jose Medellin, who confessed to police in 1993 to raping and murdering two Houston, Texas, teenagers -- Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena. The girls were sodomized and strangled with their own shoe laces, according to court records and police reports.

According to Houston Police detectives' reports, Medellin boasted that he kept one victim's Mickey Mouse watch as a souvenir of his heinous crime. Medellin and four other attackers were convicted of capital murder and are awaiting execution on death row.

The intervention in the case by the Bush administration comes after the International Court of Justice in the Hague found Medellin -- who entered the United States illegally -- was not informed of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate for legal assistance.

"Bush's support of the World Court decision jeopardizes the cases of about 50 Mexican Nationals sitting on death row," said former NYPD Det. Sidney Francis.

"Once again, President Bush is stabbing law enforcement officers -- and the people they serve -- in their backs," said Francis.

Det. Francis points to the erosion of the enormous support of law enforcement officials and organizations enjoyed by President Bush in the 2004 election.

"President Bush was endorsed by the nation's largest police organizations including the 350,000-member Fraternal Order of Police, the Police Benevolent Association and other law enforcement and security organizations and unions," said Michael Baker.

"Now his popularity among cops has hit bottom because of his refusal to protect the US from illegal aliens who cross our borders at will," he said.

Ambassador Bolton told talk host Laura Ingraham that the U.S. has no obligation to the world court in this case.

"It is ridiculous," he said. "The Vienna Convention on consular relations does not create rights personal to the individual. It's a state-to-state agreement."

Lawmakers in Washington, DC, who signed the treaty, did not believe they were creating a way for criminals on death row to "get around our judicial system," Bolton explained to Ingraham. "They haven't had enough due process? They've had the full panoply of constitutional protection, and now they're trying to create something else."

The Bush Administration became involved in the Medellin case in 2003 when President Vicente Fox's government sued the US over the consular issue in the UN's world court.

The court ruled in Mexico's favor in late 2004 and ordered the US to reconsider the Mexican inmates' murder convictions and death sentences. In February 2005, Bush announced that while he disagreed with the decision, the US would comply. He ordered courts in Texas and elsewhere to review the cases.

The Supreme Court, which had agreed to hear Medellin's case, dismissed it in order to allow the case to play out in Texas. Then in November 2006, the all-Republican Texas Court of Criminal Appeals balked at the president's order, saying Bush had overstepped his authority.

The Texas court ruled that the judicial branch -- not the White House -- should decide how to resolve the Mexican cases. It also said Medellin wasn't entitled to a new hearing because he failed to complain at his original trial about any violation of his consular rights and had therefore waived them.

Then Medellin's defense attorney appealed again to the US Supreme Court, which announced last May it would hear the case. His lawyer, Donald Donovan of New York, argued that Bush was correct when he took action to comply with the world court's decision.

Recently, for his achievements in both international arbitration and international human rights, Donovan was awarded the Premio Nacional de Jurisprudencia by the Mexican Bar Association, the first non-Mexican so honored.

What the U.S. government wants in the Medellin murder case is "bizarrely grotesque," according to a statement by the chief counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund.

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The warning from ADF Chief Counsel Benjamin Bull notes that the case, being pursued by President Bush through the Department of Justice, could result in US laws being subjugated to UN resolutions and rules to the point that local police officers will have to spend more time studying international law than catching criminals.