U.S. Abductions Abroad Upheld : Law: Supreme Court says agents may seize a foreign national in another country despite existing treaties. Justice Stevens, in dissent, calls it ‘a monstrous decision.’

Ruling in the case of slain drug agent Enrique Camarena, the Supreme Court gave U.S. agents broad power Monday to forcibly abduct foreign nationals on foreign territory.

Even when the United States has signed an extradition treaty and has pledged to respect the sovereignty of a foreign country, U.S. agents may unilaterally seize a foreign national and bring him to the United States for trial, the justices said.

“This is a matter for the executive branch,” not judges, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said from the bench in summarizing his opinion.

The 6-3 ruling specifically upholds the kidnaping of a Mexican doctor in Guadalajara to stand trial in Los Angeles for his alleged role in the 1985 murder and torture of Camarena.

But it also affirms the Bush Administration’s bold assertion of its power to enforce U.S. criminal laws abroad. Soon after taking office in 1989, Administration lawyers declared that U.S. agents have virtually unfettered authority to pursue and kidnap drug traffickers, terrorists and common criminals anywhere in the world--a power it has rarely used.

The court opinion appears to settle any jurisdictional questions involving two notable cases: the 1987 capture of Lebanese terrorist Fawaz Younis in the Mediterranean Sea and the 1989 seizure of former Panamanian dictator Manuel A. Noriega.

Monday’s ruling “vindicates the position we have taken from the outset,” said Atty. Gen. William P. Barr.

The ruling provoked a blistering dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens, who said that it is “a monstrous decision” that will shock much of the “civilized world.”

The U.S. action “unquestionably constitutes a flagrant violation of international law,” wrote Stevens, who was joined by Justices Harry A. Blackmun and Sandra Day O’Connor. The decision was roundly denounced by civil libertarians and international law experts in the United States and Mexico. It also drew a sharp rebuke from Canadian officials, who said that they would view such an abduction as “a criminal act.”

“The court has simply rubber-stamped a lawless action by low-level government officials,” said Paul L. Hoffman, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in Los Angeles.

In one sense, Monday’s decision reaffirms a century-old principle. In 1886, the court said that the U.S. Constitution did not stand in the way of trying a suspect who had been abducted by a bounty hunter in Peru and returned to Chicago for trial.

Even since then, the case of Ker vs. Illinois has stood for the principle that defendants who are brought before a judge cannot claim the charges should be dropped because they were abducted in violation of the Constitution.

Throughout the 20th Century, however, the United States has pledged through both the United Nations and in treaties with more than 100 nations to respect the territory of sovereign states. Fleeing criminals could be returned for trial here but only through an extradition request to a foreign government.

But, according to Rehnquist, neither those treaties nor international law prohibits American officials from acting on their own to cross foreign borders, grab foreign citizens and return them here for a trial.

Two years ago, in a related case, Rehnquist ruled that the 4th Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” does not prevent U.S. investigators from searching homes on foreign territory without a warrant and seizing evidence for use in a trial here.

Both the search case and Monday’s ruling on forcible abductions grew out of the highly publicized murder of Camarena, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent operating in Mexico. Nineteen persons, including top Mexican drug traffickers, have been charged with plotting to kill Camarena and his Mexican pilot in February, 1985.

Outraged by that crime, fellow DEA agents vowed to gain revenge. In 1990, they arranged for the abduction of Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, a Guadalajara gynecologist. He is alleged to have administered drugs to Camarena to keep him alive for further torture and interrogation.

The DEA agents secretly paid Mexican police $50,000 to abduct the 300-pound gynecologist in his office and fly him to El Paso. He is now held in Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, his bond set at $10 million.

When Mexican officials learned that U.S. officials were behind the kidnaping, they filed a strong protest with the State Department. In 1978, the two nations had negotiated a treaty setting forth the procedures for extraditing suspected criminals from one nation to the other.

This treaty “constitutes the sole and exclusive means” for moving a Mexican national to the United States, Mexican officials said.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California agreed and ruled that a unilateral seizure of a Mexican national violates the 1978 extradition treaty.

“If we are to see the emergence of a ‘new world order’ in which the use of force is to be subject to the rule of law, we must begin by holding our own government to its fundamental legal commitments,” wrote Judge Stephen Reinhardt for a three-judge panel.

The appeals court said that Alvarez and a second alleged participant in the Camarena murder, Rene Verdugo-Urquidez, must be returned to Mexico for prosecution there.

But Bush Administration lawyers quickly appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed that ruling Monday in the case (U.S. vs. Alvarez-Machain, 91-712).

Rehnquist conceded that the 1978 treaty set procedures for extraditing suspected criminals, but concluded that “abductions outside of the treaty (do not) constitute a violation of the treaty.”

Because the treaty does not expressly forbid cross-border abductions, Rehnquist said, the court will not “infer that it prohibits all means of gaining the presence of an individual outside of its terms.”

In condemning the decision, Abraham Abramovsky, director of the International Criminal Law Center at Fordham University, warned that it could encourage terrorists to abduct American businessmen or government officials.

“If we continue with this ‘catch and snatch’ policy, we’re going to be victimized by it,” Abramovsky said. “They’ll just say he (an American) violated their laws and they’ll just come over and grab him. The Justice Department will be hard pressed to say to them: ‘You must adhere to international law.’ ”

Times staff writer Paul Lieberman in Los Angeles contributed to this story.