RIGHTS AGENCY URGES U.S. NOT TO DEPORT AIDS PATIENT

The human rights arm of the Organization of American States is asking the
United States not to deport a terminally ill AIDS patient from the Bronx
while it reviews her claim that deportation would violate her basic right
to life.

The patient, Andrea Marie Mortlock, 41, is a legal permanent resident of
the United States who was convicted in 1987 of selling cocaine and has been
fighting a criminal deportation order for a decade. She argues that
deporting her to her native Jamaica would be "tantamount to a death
sentence" because she could not get proper AIDS medication and treatment
there and would face severe discrimination.

Her lawyers turned to the O.A.S., the organization for the 35 nations of
the Western Hemisphere, in a desperate bid to halt the deportation.

The petition is the first deportation case involving AIDS to be accepted by
the O.A.S. agency, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Advocates for human rights say it points to a larger trend: As groups like
deportable immigrants and death row inmates are being blocked from domestic
courts by legislators impatient with protracted appeals, international
bodies like the O.A.S. commission, the International Court of Justice at
The Hague, and the United Nations Committee Against Torture are expanding
their reach to fill the gap.

"In the past it hasn't been as relevant," in countries like the United
States and Canada, said Brian Tittemore, a staff lawyer for the commission,
which has mainly dealt with human rights abuses in Latin American member
states since it was founded in 1965.

"Previously people were protected under those strong national
Constitutions. But the more you see these gaps and gray areas, the more it
matters."

At the State Department, Olwyn Staples, a public affairs officer with the
United States mission to the O.A.S., said officials could not comment.

The human rights commission, based in Washington, has no enforcement
powers, but it has considerable moral authority, and an overall record of
cooperation by member states, including the United States. Unlike other
member states, however, the United States does not consider the
commission's rulings legally binding.

The commission took on three out of the 57 petitions it received against
the United States last year, out of a total of 160 petitions selected from
among 1,329 received.

It is now eager to raise its profile among American immigration lawyers,
Mr. Tittemore said, because the protections it offers transcend
nationality. Though legal scholars say it is the only international forum
where the United States responds to individual complaints, it is still
relatively unknown outside a network of American death penalty lawyers.

In Ms. Mortlock's case, her lawyers said, a student intern working for the
lawyers stumbled on the commission's existence during a frantic Internet
search for ways to halt her immediate deportation. Advocates say that Ms.
Mortlock, a former drug addict with a long history of petty larceny, turned
her life around after a judge ordered her released from nearly three years
in immigration detention in March 2003 over the government's objections.

At that time the Jamaican consulate in New York was refusing to issue
travel documents for her deportation on the ground that there was no
medical care for her illness in Jamaica.

In court filings, federal lawyers threatened sanctions against Jamaica,
faulted Ms. Mortlock for revealing her 1998 diagnosis of H.I.V./AIDS, and
vigorously opposed her release from a series of immigration detention
centers in Pennsylvania and Texas.

But Sarah Loomis Cave, a lawyer for the firm Cleary Gottlieb acting without
fee, and Olivia Cassin, a Legal Aid Society lawyer, won her release on the
basis of a Supreme Court decision known as Zadvydas v. Davis, which held
that indefinite detention - defined as more than six months - is
constitutional only if the detainee is dangerous.

In some ways, Ms. Mortlock's life reflects the dark side of familiar
immigration patterns, said her doctor, Gabriela Rodriguez-Caprio. She was a
child when her mother went to work in the United States, leaving her behind
in Jamaica in an abusive household.

Arriving in New York at 15, she eventually succumbed to drugs and petty
crime to feed her habit, and then served a year in prison on the cocaine
charge.

In and out of jobs and rehabilitation programs, she missed her day in
immigration court in 1995 and was ordered deported in absentia. Then it was
too late: in 1996, Congress adopted laws requiring deportation in a larger
number of criminal cases, sharply narrowing chances for individual judicial
review.

Since her 2003 release, Ms. Mortlock, who has a sister, a daughter, 22, and
a son, 12, who are all United States citizens, hewed to a complicated
medical regime as she sickened, took vocational courses, arranged her son's
baptism, and reported regularly to federal immigration headquarters in
Manhattan with Ms. Cassin.

She was taken into custody at the headquarters on Aug. 11, and is being
held for deportation in Passaic County jail in Paterson, N.J.

In an affidavit to the Inter-American Commission, Dr. Rodriguez-Caprio
wrote that medications, nutritional supplements and growth hormones that
slow Ms. Mortlock's illness are unavailable in Jamaica, and "her missing
these medications will lead to rapid progression and death."

Federal authorities say her illness has no bearing on their proceedings.

"It is our legal obligation to carry out a removal order that has been
issued by a federal judge," said Tim Counts, a spokesman for Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. "That is our job, and that is the only motivation
for moving forward on this removal."

In papers opposing the reopening of the 1995 deportation order, James D.
Paoli, a lawyer for the immigration agency, said that regardless of the
hardships Ms. Mortlock faces because of her illness, after more than a
decade, she "is a perfect example as to the necessity of bringing finality
to proceedings."

Ms. Cassin countered, "How can you balance finality in an immigration case
with someone's right to live?"

She cited a decision by the European Human Rights Court in the 1990's,
overruling British courts that had approved the deportation of a drug
smuggler dying of AIDS to his native St. Kitts, and holding that "his
removal would expose him to a real risk of dying under most distressing
circumstances and would thus amount to inhuman treatment."

It is the rights to life, physical integrity and protection from torture
that have most drawn international bodies into the domestic fray.

Currently, the United Nations Committee Against Torture, which monitors
compliance with the international Convention Against Torture, is demanding
more information about individual cases from the United States, which
presented a report in May.

In March 2004, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, also known
as the World Court, ruled in a lawsuit brought by Mexico against the United
States that 51 Mexicans on death row had a right to reconsideration of
their convictions and sentences under the Vienna Convention, because they
had not been informed at the time of their arrests that they could seek
help from Mexican consular officials.

The issue had reached the United States Supreme Court in one case, but
President Bush decided to comply with the World Court ruling, calling it an
exercise of his foreign affairs power. And in a growing number of high
court rulings in recent years, justices have used or cited the reasoning in
international decisions, including some by the Inter-American Commission.

Conservatives like Richard Samp, chief legal counsel to the Washington
Legal Foundation, deplore this development as an intrusion on the
prerogatives of the elected branches of government.

"If Congress makes a determination that someone should be deported
regardless of the fact that they have AIDS, then they ought to be deported,
regardless of whether there's an opposing position by a body like the
O.A.S.," he said.

Human rights advocates like Juan Mendez, a former president of the
commission who now directs the International Center for Transitional
Justice in New York, welcome the trend. "International law is not going to
substitute for domestic policy or domestic law," he said, "but it's going
to test the limits and push the envelope in the direction of more
protections rather than less."