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This after Texas executes a man in spite of objections from the World Court.
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Oh great. More urging. I just dont see how bombing the crap out of them is going to help. -
Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
See, Bush has a sense of humor
KaaComment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
José Medellín, a Mexican citizen, and five of his gang buddies raped and murdered a couple of young teenage girls. Two are on death row, two in for life, the last in for 40 years. I have no sympathy for any of them.
However, a 1963 treaty the US signed says foreign nationals of various signatory countries are allowed the council of their respective consulates. He didn't get it.
The law is imperfect, in fact the legal system is a mess, but when the law is violated by lawyers and the courts fail to correct it, the judicial system becomes a farce.
Here we are again - in violation of international law, trashing our treaties and making a mockery of the motto “A Country of Laws.”Over the last five days, Mr. Medellín’s lawyers tried to stop the execution by arguing to the Supreme Court that it should be put off until Congress had a chance to pass pending legislation that would require a review of similar cases. They argued that Mr. Medellín would be deprived of life without due process if he died before Congress acted.
But the court, in a 5-to-4 decision, said the possibility of Congressional action was too remote to justify a stay. Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in dissent that to permit the execution would place the United States “irremediably in violation of international law and breaks our treaty promises.”
"They hate us because we're free." KMAComment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Bush plans to urge China to improve human rightsI'd much rather lay in my bunk all freakin day lookin at Youtube videos .Comment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Wow...Bush looks like a bad ass
or a wanna be bad ass LOL"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do, than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." - Mark Twain
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The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
Personal failures are too important to be trusted to others.Comment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Not really.
Gulf of Tonkin Incident -
On August 4, 1964, the American destroyers reported a second engagement with North Vietnamese boats. However, this second report was later discovered to be untrue. Together, these two incidents prompted the first large-scale involvement of U.S. armed forces in Vietnam.Comment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Here is some finer details
A Mexican man at the centre of an international legal dispute has been executed in Texas for the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl in 1993.
While protestors both for and against the death penalty demonstrated outside the Huntsville Unit near Houston last night, José Medellín, 33, died after being given a lethal injection.
The execution came just before 10pm shortly after the US supreme court denied a last request for a reprieve.
Pleas for a stay came from Washington, Mexico and the international court of justice (ICJ).
They had all urged Texas not to execute Medellín until a hearing had been held to determine whether or not his original trial was sound.
The state's Republican governor, Rick Perry, rebutted attempts to delay off the execution arguing thatthe state's courts were not bound by the rulings of the ICJ.
The ICJ in the Hague had ordered Medellín's case and those of 50 other Mexicans on death row be reviewed because none had been informed of their right to consular assistance.
The US state department said it was powerless to delay the execution, noting that the country's supreme court had ruled in March that president Bush did not have the authority to intervene in the case.
The Mexican government has now sent a note of protest to the US state department, expressing "its concern for the precedent that (the execution) may create for the rights of Mexican nationals who may be detained in that country."
Medellín and five other teenage boys in his Houston street gang took part in the rape and murder of two girls, Elizabeth Pena, 16, and Jennifer Ertman, 14, in 1993.
Medellín, who was born in Mexico but moved to the US as a child, was convicted of Pena's murder and has never contested the conviction.
Two other members of the gang were also sentenced to die. Two had their sentences commuted to life in prison. The sixth, Medellín's brother, Vernacio, is serving a 40-year sentence.
Medellín's case has become the focal point of the dispute between Mexico, which does not have the death penalty, and the US over whether or not some Mexicans on death row were denied fair trials because of the lack of consular access.
The 1963 Vienna Convention, which both Mexico and the US signed, requires foreigners accused of crimes to be given that opportunity.
Over the last five days, Medellín's lawyers tried to stop the execution by arguing to the Supreme Court that it should be put off until Congress had a chance to pass pending legislation that would require a review of similar cases.
They argued that Medellín would be deprived of life without due process if he died before Congress acted.
But the court decided 5-4 that the possibility of congressional action was too remote to justify a stay.
One member of the supreme court, justice Stephen Breyer wrote however, that to permit the execution would place the US "irremediably in violation of international law and breaks our treaty promises."
Mexico, which opposes the death penalty, has used the Vienna convention on consular relations to try to block the executions of Medellín and 50 other Mexicans in the US.
Twice in the last five years, the ICJ has said hearings should be held to determine if the 51 trials were fairComment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Did I forget to point this out?????The US state department said it was powerless to delay the execution, noting that the country's supreme court had ruled in March that president Bush did not have the authority to intervene in the case.
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
"The law is imperfect, in fact the legal system is a mess, but when the law is violated by lawyers and the courts fail to correct it, the judicial system becomes a farce."
More to the point: "GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Aug. 6 -- Osama bin Laden's former driver was convicted on one charge and acquitted on another Wednesday, handing the Bush administration a partial victory in the first U.S. war crimes trial in a half-century but failing to settle the debate over whether the proceeding was just. "
Now while it's good that Military trial the system has gotten off the ground here, the fact remains that if he had been acquitted of all 10 charges, he'd still be held in custody indefinitely. Not as a 'prisoner of war', but indefinitely as an 'enemy combatant' in an open-ended 'war on terrorism' thus taking him and fellow prisoners out of the jurisdiction of the Geneva Convention and the International Red Cross.Comment
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The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
Personal failures are too important to be trusted to others.Comment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
Sorry for the thread drift.
The second Tonkin incident was a hoax. We said it happened so we could escalate the war.
Ring any bells? WMD perhaps?The outcome of the incident was the passage by Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by "communist aggression". The resolution served as Johnson's legal justification for escalating American involvement in the Vietnam War.
In 2005, an official NSA declassified report revealed that the USS Maddox first fired warning shots on the August 2 incident and that there may not have been North Vietnamese boats at the August 4 incident. The report said -
"It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night. In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August."Comment
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Re: Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights.
"Bush plans to urge China to improve human rights."
Allow me to translate into Chinese:
"The USA attempts, once more, to disrupt the harmony of the united Chinese people ahead of the Olympics".IMAGINES VEL NON FUERINTComment
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