United States v. Alvarez-Machain

The Machain case was a highly publicized international abduction owing in part to the unusual use of bounty hunters by U.S. officials. The United States had directly orchestrated the abduction of a Mexican citizen on Mexican soil against the wishes of the Mexican government.

The abduction and trial severely strained relations between the United States and Mexico and attracted substantial negative international reaction of not only allies, but Iran and China as well, concerning human rights issues. The district court, in the retrial, dismissed the charges against Machain for lack of evidence.

The decision demonstrated the Court's increasing tendency to rule in favor of the United States in foreign treaty disputes and diverge from the international standards of good faith and liberal interpretation. To the astonishment of the international law community, the Court derived its decision in Machain entirely from its own previous decisions, avoiding any use of relevant decisions by courts of other nations. As this and the Itel Containers International Corporation v. Huddleston (1993) case the following year clearly indicated, foreign governments' interpretations of treaties carried little weight in American courts. Even sections on treaty interpretation in the 1980 Vienna Convention were overlooked. In stark contrast to foreign courts as noted by Stevens' dissent, the Court treated a case with international implications solely as a domestic case with domestic precedents and domestic answers.

Treaty cases heard by the Court in the late 1980s and early 1990s demonstrated the exceptional degree the Court yielded to the wishes of the executive branch. The Court, recognizing the constitutional role of the president in establishing treaties, in effect implicitly applied the "political question doctrine." In other words, international treaty disputes were considered matters for the president and Congress to decide and should not be the subject of court rulings.

Given the Court's position, international kidnapping proved to be an attractive tool for U.S. law officials seeking to avoid lengthy extradition procedures in obtaining suspects or when dealing with uncooperative governments. At times the abductions were quietly sanctioned by sympathetic governments where extradition was not popular with its citizens. Such abductions were particularly useful in fighting international drug crime.

The Machain case raised questions of how the United States should regulate its police activities in other countries, the president's role in foreign relations, and treatment of foreign defendants in U.S. courts. Legislative solutions were immediately but unsuccessfully sought after the Machain decision. Legislators introduced a bill in Congress in 1992 forbidding prosecution of persons abducted by U.S. officials in violation of treaty terms or despite government protests.