Texas will go ahead with the execution of five Mexicans ignoring a stay ordered by the International Criminal Court in The Hague (ICC).
 
Spokesperson for Governor Rick Perry, Robert Black, stated, "Nothing is going to change because of what a foreign court says. The US Supreme Court has ruled that Texas is not subject to a foreign court."
 
In March the Supreme Court also ruled that not even the president could ask Texas to re-examine the cases of the 51 Mexicans condemned to death in Texas and on death row, in defiance of an earlier ruling by the ICC in 2004.
 
Texas Governor Perry is breaking ex Governor George W. Bush's record of allowing 152 executions during his mandate. Perry has reached 168 with time to spare.
 
The failure by US authorities to recognize the ICC effectively places the US outside the parameters of international law. This allows US soldiers to commit atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan; maintain a concentration camp at Guantanamo incarcerating people with no charges and have secret CIA prisons in Poland and the Czech Republic.
 
Considering that the US is painted in the corporate media as "leader of the free world" would anyone deny that such abuses of human rights have placed it on the status of a "rogue state"?
 
What will Mexico's President Calderón say about these executions? Probably nothing just as he did when Mexican students were bombed to death in the Ecuadorian jungle by Colombian and US forces on May 2nd in an illegal military operation on sovereign territory.
 
Place the boot on the other foot for a moment. What would happen if a state such as China or Iran decided to try and execute 56 US citizens in their country and ignore stays by the ICC?
 
This is yet another shameful chapter in contemporary Texan and US history. However, the main culprit is not the Executive, but the US Supreme Court taking the US into a legal limbo where it can do what it wants, where it wants and how it wants with total impunity.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLES BY ARTURO ROSALES