Mexico vs. U.S. in UN. (Insider Report).

Last fall, the Mexican government filed a complaint against the U.S. before the UN's Human Rights Committee, alleging that "migrants" (read: illegal immigrants) were being illegally detained in this country. On January 9th, Mexico filed a complaint before the UN's International Court of Justice (commonly called the "World Court") charging that "American officials have violated the rights of all 54 Mexicans on death row in the United States and asking that their executions be commuted," reported the Washington Post.

According to the Mexican complaint, state and local courts in the U.S. routinely assign Mexican defendants public defenders who "speak little or no Spanish and have no experience in death penalty cases." This supposedly violates the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, requiring that people accused of a crime in a foreign country be given access to their country's diplomatic missions. If state and local courts followed Mexico's interpretation of the treaty, contends Mexican Foreign Ministry lawyer Juan Manuel Gomez Robledo, Mexican consulates would provide Spanish-speaking lawyers with detailed knowledge of U.S. capital cases. On February 5th, the World Court ruled that Texas and Oklahoma must temporarily stay the execution of three Mexicans on death row.

Of course, Mexico's official policy of encouraging illegal immigration to the U.S. has made it practically impossible to comply with that interpretation of the treaty: Some 100,000 or more Mexican nationals are currently in U.S. prisons. Moreover, Mexico is notoriously unwilling to extradite Mexicans accused of murdering Americans while in this country illegally.