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The opportunity to politicize the rescue of Captain Phillips from Somali pirates was one Barack Obama could not resist. Obama’s handlers played the crisis for every ounce of P.R. they could generate. We heard a “quietly confident Obama” twice “gave the order to shoot if necessary.” Yet when Phillips first jumped from the lifeboat he was being held in, nothing happened. No one saved him, and the pirates merely scooped him up and returned him to their “ship.” Our Navy Seals were on the scene ready to act, yet at first they did nothing. Why the Seal commander didn’t act...

JUDGES should interpret the Constitution according to other nations' legal "norms." Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an "axis of disobedience" along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq. Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government's top lawyers: Harold Koh.

Long held U.S. antagonism to the International Criminal Court could soften under a new president, but that does not mean that either Barack Obama or John McCain is ready to sign on. Both Obama and McCain generally favor the concept of a standing tribunal to deal with war crimes, but they share President Bush's anxiety about the potential of politically motivated prosecutions of U.S. officials or soldiers. They do not share, however, what has been at times Bush's outright hostility to the court.

The execution of José Ernesto Medellín Rojas by the state of Texas is a violation of international law, said Amnesty International today. "It undermines the authority of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) which had ruled in favour of a stay of execution."

An illegal immigrant from Honduras who claimed his treaty rights were violated when he was arrested for a robbery-murder near Dallas lost his appeal ... at the U.S. Supreme Court, clearing the way for his execution. In the second case of its kind this week in Texas, lawyers for condemned killer Heliberto Chi went to the nation's highest court claiming Chi should have been told he could get legal assistance from the Honduran consulate when he was arrested in California and extradited to Texas to face charges for killing his former boss at a men's clothing store during a robbery...

HOUSTON — In a case that has drawn international attention, Texas executed José E. Medellín on Tuesday night in defiance of an international court ruling and despite pleas from the Bush administration for a new hearing. The execution came just before 10 p.m. Central time, shortly after the United States Supreme Court denied a last request for a reprieve. Protesters for and against the death penalty clamored in the rain outside the Huntsville Unit, about 70 miles north of Houston, where Mr. Medellín was executed by lethal injection. “I’m sorry my actions caused you pain,” he said to the witnesses...

Seven Mexican-born inmates on Texas' death row lost their bid Monday to state their case before the U.S. Supreme Court, following the court's ruling last week that another Mexican-born inmate's case couldn't be reopened despite an order from President Bush. Justices last week voted 6-3 against hearing the case of Jose Medellin, convicted of the rape-slayings of two Houston teenagers 15 years ago, saying Bush overstepped his authority by trying to order Texas to reopen Medellin's case. That decision removed a legal hurdle blocking Medellin's execution. An international court ruled in 2004 that the convictions of Medellin and 50 other...

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said Tuesday that he will seek Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's denunciation in international court for financing a terrorist group. Camilo Ospina, Colombia's ambassador to the United Nations, will go before the International Criminal Court to accuse Chavez of "supporting and financing genocides," Uribe told reporters. The Colombian leader alleged Monday that correspondence taken from computers seized in last weekend's military raid into Ecuador showed Chavez had given $300 million to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Colombia's largest rebel group, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, has sought to overthrow the government for more than 40...

As part of her job at an influential national security think tank, Julianne Smith brings politicians and senior policy-makers from all over Europe to Washington for candid closed-door meetings with the policy advisers to the candidates vying to replace President George W. Bush. The Europeans usually arrive eager to discuss the coming era that some are dubbing "AB" — "After Bush." That is the highly anticipated period beginning on Jan. 20, 2009, in which a newly sworn-in American president, chastened by the troubles in Iraq and by the scorn of allies who say the Bush White House flouted international law,...

WASHINGTON - To put it bluntly, Texas wants President Bush to get out of the way of the state's plan to execute a Mexican for the brutal killing of two teenage girls. Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the execution of Jose Ernesto Medellin in what has become a confusing test of presidential power that the Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out. The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated...

Excerpt - THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Former Liberian President Charles Taylor arrived in the Netherlands on Tuesday for a war crimes trial on charges accusing him in the death, rape or mutilation of hundreds of thousands of people in West Africa. An airport official said Taylor's U.N.-chartered plane landed after a direct flight from Sierra Leone, where he had been in detention since March 29. Two police vans and five motorcycle outriders were waiting on the tarmac at a small commercial airport south of The Hague. ~ snip ~

Prompted by an international tribunal's decision last year ordering new hearings for 51 Mexicans on death rows in the United States, the State Department said yesterday that the United States had withdrawn from the protocol that gave the tribunal jurisdiction to hear such disputes. The withdrawal followed a Feb. 28 memorandum from President Bush to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales directing state courts to abide by the decision of the tribunal, the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The decision required American courts to grant "review and reconsideration" to claims that the inmates' cases had been hurt by the...

...The European elites had spent much of Tuesday evening dreaming about how a President Kerry would ratify the Kyoto accords, sign on to the International Criminal Court, cut and run in Iraq, send flowers to Yasser Arafat and, perhaps, open a dialogue with Osama bin Laden. When it became clear that the American voters wanted none of that, the chattering classes in Europe were left speechless.... With Dubya's victory, it will no longer be possible for the Hate-America international to pose as merely anti-Bush. Their claim that Bush and his gang of Likudniks had somehow hijacked the United States has...

LANSING, Mich. - Some Michigan voters have received phone calls falsely claiming that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (news - web sites) would make gay marriage legal, Kerry's Michigan campaign said Monday. Both Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards (news - web sites) of North Carolina, oppose gay marriage and say marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. Kerry has said he supports civil unions. In a recording of a phone call played for The Associated Press, a young woman says: "When you vote this Tuesday remember to legalize gay marriage by supporting John Kerry....

Among various principles invoked by the International Court of Justice in its highly publicized decision on Israel's security fence is this one: It is a violation of international law for Jews to be living in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem.

WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. economic aid could only flow to countries that have agreed not to surrender Americans to a world court for prosecution of war crimes, under a measure the U.S. House of Representatives approved Thursday. The 241-166 vote by the Republican-controlled chamber expanded the current prohibition on military aid to such countries. The target of the amendment was the International Criminal Court, which began operating last year in The Hague, Netherlands. It is a permanent court that is supposed to enter cases involving genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity when the countries involved cannot work out a...

On March 31, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), located in The Hague, ruled in favor of suit brought by the Mexican government against the United States regarding Mexican nationals currently sitting on death row.  If, like most Americans, you consider court rulings from The Hague about as relevant as the Eurovision song contest, consider the cases of two men, the first an American citizen, the second a Mexican. In 1992, a Mexican judge sentence[d] Chicago-born Alfonso Martin del Campo Dodd to 50 years in prison for the murder of his sister and her husband, despite the fact that the...

Responding to a constituent's request to oppose the Law of the Seas Treaty, Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., told his constituent that the treaty did not surrender national sovereignty. When pressed for an explanation of the Senator's claim, when Article 2(3) clearly says that "sovereignty over the territorial sea is exercised subject to this Convention ...," the senator's staff said, "We'll have to get back to you on that." After three phone calls over seven days, Myron Nordquist responded, not to speak for the senator, but as an adviser to the senator. He says that Article 2(3) does not surrender national...

The security fence is dragged before an international court that has been fed one-sided evidence The UN's anti-Israel theater is playing a new venue: The UN's International Court of Justice is hearing the case of Israel's security fence. The judges may be unbiased, but the question brought to them by the General Assembly is nothing more than the UN's routine discriminatory treatment of Israel dressed up in lawyers' robes and wigs. Same music, same lyrics, new costumes. In December, the pro-Palestinian majority in the General Assembly passed a resolution that asked the court to examine the legal consequences of Israel's...

Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said Friday he was confident Mexico will win an International Court of Justice battle to cancel the executions of 54 Mexican citizens on death row in the United States. The government has claimed it is illegal to kill the prisoners because they were refused their right to legal assistance from the Mexican consulate. The United States argues that granting Mexico's request to cancel the executions would violate U.S. sovereignty. "This is a very important case for Mexico, and we will not fail. Not one Mexican who has been denied his consular rights (in the United...

U.N. Condemns Attacks on Workers NITED NATIONS, Aug. 26 — The Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution today declaring that attacks on United Nations aid workers on missions "constitute war crimes." The resolution, originally proposed last spring by Mexico, was passed one week after a suicide truck bomber devastated the United Nations mission in Iraq, killing 23 people, including 18 United Nations staff members and the mission's leader, Sergio Vieira de Mello. The resolution was an answer to Secretary General Kofi Annan's plea to "bring to account those who attack these innocent and unarmed civilian humanitarian workers." A potential confrontation...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States on Tuesday suspended military assistance to nearly 50 countries, including Colombia and six nations seeking NATO membership, because they have supported the International Criminal Court and failed to exempt Americans from possible prosecution. As the deadline passed for governments to sign exemption agreements or face the suspension of military aid, President Bush issued waivers for 22 countries. But the 22 countries did not include Colombia, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Colombia, where the government is fighting leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers, has been one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 29 (UPI) -- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf said Saturday efforts were growing to try President George W. Bush as a war criminal before an international criminal court. The Iraqi minister said "there are law professors from Latin America, the Arab region and Europe" joining the effort. During his daily press briefing, the Iraqi Information Minister said a total of 140 Iraqis were killed and 351 others injured by coalition airstrikes on the country in less than 24 hours. He also accused British forces of bombarding food warehouses in Basra while a number of coalition reconnaissance...

<p>DON'T BE FOOLED by Colin Powell. With testimony before the UN Security Council last week, the secretary of state brought many formerly ambivalent politicians and pundits into the war party. But that is a measure of how callow (immature) the entire American debate over war against Iraq has been. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein is up to no good. Powell's indictment confirmed the Iraqi's malfeasance, although with no surprises and no demonstration of immediate threat. The question, rather, is what to do about Saddam's malevolence.</p>

MEXICO CITY -- Mexico said Thursday it has asked the World Court in the Hague to resolve the case of 54 Mexicans on death row in the United States who allegedly were denied their rights to consular representation under an international treaty. Mexico's foreign relations department has made such allegations against the United States in the past -- one recent case led President Vicente Fox to cancel a meeting with U.S. President George W. Bush last summer. But this is the first time officials have brought the matter to an international court. In a news release, the foreign relations...

Below is the full text of the ICDSM's motion, filed with The Hague Tribunal on 5 November by Nico Varkevisser. The motion contains our proposals for solving the life-threatening health crisis brought on by the ICTY's abuse of Slobodan Milosevic.

<p>After World War II, the victorious allies rounded up top Nazis, put them on trial and executed many of them. The Nuremberg trials established the principle that waging aggresssive war is a hanging offense under international law.</p> <p>Yet Bush, egged on by Ariel Sharon, is planning to wage aggressive war against Iraq.</p>

U.S.-EU Split on International Court Resurfaces Tue Aug 13, 6:28 PM ET By Elaine Monaghan WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A transatlantic tussle over whether Americans should face international justice resurfaced Tuesday as the United States accused Brussels of inappropriately telling European Union ( news - web sites) hopefuls to follow its lead on the issue and not Washington's. A State Department spokesman said EU advice to would-be members not to exempt Americans from the justice of the International Criminal Court until the 15-nation bloc agreed a position was "inappropriate, in seeking to direct candidate country foreign policy choices in advance of...

Informers From the Left Moshe Feiglin 12 August 2002 Email this story Print this story What is this business with the Peace Bloc all about? What makes them wish to inform on IDF officers at the International Court in the Hague? Have they gone out of their minds? How could they commit such blatant acts of treachery? Two elements are involved in this issue. The first is an ancient Jewish mental illness. The phenomenon of a Jew who runs to betray his fellow Jews to the Gentiles is not a new one. It began with the Hebrew who hit his...

Freep this CNN.com poll. It deals with the world court. I know that it has a ton of votes and it is the Commie news network so it's probably rigged but you may as well try.

By Irwin Arieff UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Washington said on Monday it was pulling all three U.S. soldiers out of a U.N. force in East Timor to back up its hard-line threat to kill off U.N. missions one by one until its concerns about a new global war crimes court were met. "It has started in East Timor. We are pulling out our three peacekeepers there," a U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. But U.S. officials had no quick answer when asked what it would do about another 75 Americans in East Timor who were helping train the...

Rights Groups Assail U.S. Efforts to Win Exemption from International Criminal CourtFri Jun 28,11:00 AM ETJim Lobe,OneWorld US United States and international human rights groups are calling on members of the United Nations ( news - web sites) Security ( news - external web site) Council to reject U.S. efforts this week to exempt U.S. citizens and others serving in UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) from the scope of the new International Criminal Court (ICC), the world's first permanent tribunal to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. • Coalition for the International Criminal Court • Amnesty International •...

YES voting, which now has 62%, is winning this poll and A YES means you are IN FAVOR OF the International criminal court (AND THE UNITED STATES PARTICIPATING IN SAME!). The NOs only have 38%. Obviously, they haven't heard from us Freepers!! Please go to http://forums.ft.com/2/OpenTopic and let them know what YOU think.

Next week, March 18 through March 21, is going to determine whether liberty continues to exist in the world or whether everyone will fall pray to the schemes of the United Nations to become a one-world government imposing a New World Order. My friend, Henry Lamb, the chairman of Sovereignty International, [www.sovereignty.net] recently wrote about the similarities between Hitler's mad dreams of global dominance and the United Nations' careful, slow creep and crawl toward the same goal. In the end, just as the United States and its allies put an end to Herr Hitler's villainy, the US remains the...