If you're arrested while vacationing outside of the U.S., don't count
on your jailers letting the American Embassy see you:

U.S. Quits Agreement on Access to Diplomats
Thu Mar 10, 2005 12:55 AM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has withdrawn from an
international agreement that guarantees jailed foreigners the right to
talk to consular officers, a protocol that has been used by opponents
of capital punishment, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice notified U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan, in a letter dated March 7, that the United States "hereby
withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on
Consular Relations, the newspaper reported.

In recent years, other countries with support from U.S. death penalty
opponents have successfully complained before the World Court that
their citizens were sentenced to death by U.S. states without receiving
access to diplomats from their home countries.

A State Department spokesman was not immediately available for comment
on the report.

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 home-country diplomat.

President 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 U.S. officials failed to tell them of
their right to speak to consular officers right after their arrests.

The U.S. government previously left it up to the states to decide what
to do in the cases of the 51 Mexicans.

A State Department spokeswoman told The Washington Post that withdrawal
from the Vienna Convention protocol was a way of protecting against
future World Court rulings that disrupt the U.S. domestic criminal
system.

The U.S. 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 Secretary of State Rice meets on
Thursday with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7859607