In one of his earliest comedies, Woody Allen had a stereotypical pompous U.S. ambassador bellow to an equally stereotypical group of thuggish Eastern European cops that no American could be dragged off and shot without his personal approval.
The ambassador's shout was an understandable, if tortured, explication of something we all know and value: Our diplomatic and consular officials overseas have a primordial responsibility to protect the rights and interests of our citizens traveling and working abroad. The right of people traveling abroad to have immediate assistance from their consulates is so basic that it is enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a global treaty endorsed by the United States and about 170 other nations.
No citizen is more in need of consular support than one who faces the terrifying ordeal of arrest and imprisonment under a foreign legal system. Immediate access to a consular representative provides trustworthy guidance through the morass of a bewildering judicial process and affords a secure link to home. In some parts of the world, consular assistance is all that stands between foreign prisoners and abuse, torture or even death in custody.
Because thousands of U.S. citizens are jailed abroad every year (sometimes for no good reason), anything that diminishes the power of American consuls to assist them in their time of need is cause for concern. Yet current developments in our own nation are threatening the power of American consuls.
At issue are the cases of 51 Mexican nationals who were arrested, tried and sentenced to death in the United States but were denied consular notification and access. Mexico sought a remedy for these U.S. breaches of the Vienna Convention at the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial arm of the United Nations and the international body that the U.S. and other Vienna Convention signatories had agreed would resolve such disputes. The United States was the strongest proponent of the court at the time of the formation of the United Nations and was the first nation to invoke its jurisdiction related to the Vienna Convention, in a case filed against Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis.
The court heard the case filed by Mexico and, after hearings that involved the full participation of the United States, directed a modest remedy consistent with our nation's commitment to the rule of law: a judicial proceeding in each of the cases to determine whether each defendant's case was prejudiced by not having consular access. In 2004, the Bush administration attempted to enforce the court judgment by directing states to provide that judicial review.
