Justice Sandra Day O’Connor predicts that the U.S. Supreme Court will increasingly base its decisions on international law rather than the U.S. Constitution, according to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
By doing so, the court will make a good impression among people from other countries, she said.
“The impressions we create in this world are important and they can leave their mark,” Justice O’Connor said.
On the whole, the U.S. judicial system leaves a favorable impression around the world, she said “but when it comes to the impression created by the treatment of foreign and international law and the United States court, the jury is still out.”
The 73-year-old justice made her remarks at a dinner in Atlanta sponsored by the Southern Center for International Studies.
The first cited case was decided in 2002 when the Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to execute the mentally retarded, she said. In arriving at that decision, Justice O’Connor said, the high court noted that the world community overwhelmingly disapproved of the practice.
Also influential was a court brief filed by American diplomats who discussed the difficulties confronted in their foreign missions due to U.S. death-penalty practices, she said.
The second ruling cited by Justice O’Connor was the striking down of the Texas antisodomy law, relying partly on a series of decisions by European courts on the same issue.
“I suspect,” Justice O’Connor said, “that over time we will rely increasingly — or take notice, at least — increasingly on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues.”
I’d express my opinion on this but I don’t like to use profanity. O’Connor is deciding US Supreme Court cases based on making EU-lite intellectual poofs happy?
WHAT ABOUT YOUR XXXXING OATH TO UPHOLD THE US CONSTITUTION AS THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND? Or is it that international opinion frowns on taking that kind of thing seriously?
So now two of the nine on the Supreme Court no longer regard the US Constitution, even in its “living” form, as the final word.
[source]
Last week, Canadians were outraged!!! to discover Sony was producing a PlayStation game in which violent Quebec separatists were the villains. One separatist Quebec MP, who presumably managed to contain her outrage when Jacques Parizeau blamed the “ethnic vote” for helping federalists win the 1995 referendum, declared the game “hate propaganda”. Sony ultimately agreed to change the game, and everyone relaxed, now that the people who want to break up Canada weren’t offended anymore.
This week, police in Montreal arrested seven separatist radicals who had homemade bombs in their car:
Seven arrests, the discovery of explosive devices, and anti-English graffiti in communities that want to break away for Montreal have some people in the city on edge. […]
The letters FLQ, which stands for Front de liberation du Quebec, were also spray-painted onto the building. The separatist terrorist organization was responsible for the murder of provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte back in October 1970. […]
Police said they know very little about the group, but they are linked to convicted FLQ terrorist Raymond Villeneuve.
The 54-year-old Villeneuve is now the leader of the Mouvement de libération nationale du Québec (MLNQ).
In an interview with CFCF news, Villeneuve compared the plight of Quebec nationalists to that of the Palestinians and warned the violence could soon escalate.
“There is no limit. The Algerians, the Palestinians, they kill themselves because they are occupied,” Villeneuve said.
But, you know, it’s wrong to put this kind of thing in a video game and give people the impression that there are violent Qebecois separatists.
Noam Chomsky, attending an academic conference, said the United States needs to “conjure up another imminent threat” to make up for their “failure” to occupy Iraq. The conference in question was held in Havana, and Castro himself attended Chomsky’s lecture. […] But don’t worry, human-rights activists: he assured his audience that the jailing of 75 Cuban dissidents was “a mistake”. Whatta guy.If the incarceration of the Cuban dissidents really was a mistake, why didn’t Chomsky ask Castro, who was in the audience, to correct it? Don’t count on any Chomsky cultist to wonder about that.
[source]
The debate over whether Turkey is to deploy troops in Iraq as part of a US lead stability force is closed, Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said on Wednesday night.
[…] even though the Turkish parliament voted to authorise the government to send troops […] in the past week, Washington has backed off from its request for Turkey to send up to 10,000 troops to Iraq to serve as peace keepers due to increasing opposition from Iraqi leaders.
This was a contentious issue in the blogosphere as well, as to whether the symbolism of a Muslim majority state sending troops was worth the inevitable friction between Iraqis (particularly Kurds) and the Turks.
[source]
President Bush on how the reconstruction of Iraq would be easy after the invasion:
We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We’re bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We’re pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime, who will be held to account for their crimes. We’ve begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated. We’re helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for himself, instead of hospitals and schools. And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done.
Speech on the USS Lincoln after the invasion
The work ahead is demanding. It will be difficult to help freedom take hold in a country that has known three decades of dictatorship, secret police, internal divisions, and war. It will be difficult to cultivate liberty and peace in the Middle East, after so many generations of strife. Yet, the security of our nation and the hope of millions depend on us, and Americans do not turn away from duties because they are hard. We have met great tests in other times, and we will meet the tests of our time.
26 Feb 2003
Our victory in Iraq is certain, but it is not complete. Centralized power of the dictator has ended — yet, in parts of Iraq, desperate and dangerous elements remain. Forces of our coalition will engage these enemies until they surrender or until they’re destroyed. We have waged this war with determination and with clarity of purpose. And we will see it through until the job is done. As we press on to liberate every corner of Iraq, we are beginning the difficult work of helping Iraqis to build a free and stable country.
15 Apr 2003
American and coalition forces still face serious risks in Iraq. Scattered enemy is still capable of doing harm to our forces and to the innocent. But we’ll stay focused. We will finish what we’ve begun. We will press on until our mission is finished and victory is complete… With all the hardships of this transition, the lives of the Iraqi people will be better than anything they have known for generations. The journey from a totalitarian, brutal dictatorship to a free society is not easy. It will take time to build the institutions of democracy and the habits of freedom.
16 Apr 2003
Based on this, I expect a standard meme for Big Media will be that Bush “lied” about how easy the reconstruction would be.
[source]
[US Senators] Roberts and Rockefeller, who have been waiting for information that they said “was to have been provided five months ago,” also took offense at another part of Tenet’s Friday letter that said there was “additional material” still to be supplied to the panel. “The committee has been patient,” the senators wrote yesterday, “but we need immediate access to this information.”
If you’re a rogue agency, feuding semi-openly with the Executive Branch, it doesn’t seem very smart to piss off the Senate in a bi-partisan fashion.