US quits accord on diplomatic access to inmates

The United States has withdrawn from an international agreement that gives jailed foreigners the right to talk to consular officers, a protocol that critics of capital punishment used to win reviews of death sentences given to 51 Mexicans jailed here. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed a report in the Washington Post on Thursday that the United States had decided to pull out of the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.
"All these people have the right to raise their issues in court," Boucher told reporters travelling with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on a trip to Mexico, which opposes US death penalty policies.
Boucher said that given some of the interpretations made by the World Court "we didn't want any more of them."
Rice had notified UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in a letter dated March 7, that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the protocol, the Post reported.
In recent years, other countries with support from US death penalty opponents have successfully complained before the World Court that their citizens were sentenced to death by US states without access to diplomats from their own nations.
The optional protocol gives the World Court, which is also known as the International Court of Justice, the final word when detainees say they have been denied the right to see a diplomat from their country.
US President George W. Bush agreed in late February to comply with a year-old World Court decision that the United States should review the cases of 51 Mexican death row inmates because US officials failed to tell them of their right to speak to consular officers right after their arrests.
The US government previously left it up to the states to decide what to do in the cases of the 51 Mexicans.
The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on March 28 in the case of Mexican Jose Medellin who was convicted of murder during a sexual assault and sentenced to death in 1994 in Texas.
His case has drawn wide attention in Mexico, where Rice meets on Thursday with Mexican President Vicente Fox.