Split decision

The U.S. Supreme Court got it half-right Tuesday when it ruled that President Bush lacked the authority to tell courts in Texas to honor a decision of the International Court of Justice and reopen the case of a Mexican citizen on Texas’ death row. But it should have acted on its own authority to give Jose Medellin another day in court. By not doing so, it sends the message that the United States isn’t serious about honoring its treaty obligations.

In 2004, the World Court ruled that Medellin and 50 other Mexicans sentenced to death in the United States -- including 28 in California -- had been deprived of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. That treaty, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1969, requires that consulates be informed when one of their nationals is arrested or imprisoned. The international court directed the United States “to provide by means of its own choosing, review and reconsideration of the convictions and sentences of the Mexican nationals.”

Responding to the decision, Bush in 2005 issued a memorandum in which he said that state courts should “give effect” to the World Court ruling. But Texas’ highest criminal court essentially told both the World Court and the president to mind their own business, holding that under state law Medellin had exhausted his habeas corpus appeals. On Tuesday, the high court agreed in a 6-3 decision. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Bush’s order was justified neither by the Constitution nor by an act of Congress.

Roberts is right. In our system, state courts (as well as federal courts) are not supposed to take their orders from the president. They are, however, obliged to defer to the Supreme Court’s decisions on “the law of the land.” But instead of holding that the Vienna Convention justified a new hearing for Medellin, Roberts concluded that the treaty was not “self-executing.” Without legislation from Congress, state courts could ignore the treaty.

As Justice Stephen G. Breyer pointed out in a persuasive dissent, the Constitution’s supremacy clause says that “all Treaties ... which shall be made ... under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby.” Breyer noted that the Supreme Court often had enforced treaty provisions without additional action by Congress. Medellin’s case, he argued, deserved the same treatment.

The role of the Supreme Court is to decide “what the law is,” as Chief Justice John Marshall observed, not to worry about how its rulings will affect foreign affairs. Even so, the majority’s refusal to apply the Vienna Convention in this case will have consequences for U.S. diplomacy and for the way Americans are treated abroad. If police in this country can successfully flout the treaty, so can police in other countries.