The government has appealed to a U.S. court to spare the life of its citizen Avram Nika currently facing execution in Nevada saying its consulate was not informed of his arrest as required by international law, U.S. media released.

Serbia, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed last week in court in Reno, maintains the notification would have provided Avram Nika with assistance that could have spared him the death penalty.

Nika, 41, is on death row at Ely State Prison for the 1994 killing of a man who stopped to help him at a highway near Reno. He has yet to exhaust his state and federal appeals. Nika was particularly vulnerable to the denial of consular assistance due to his inability to speak English and his lack of familiarity with the U.S. legal system and culture, brief says.

The failure to notify the consulate caused no mitigating evidence to be presented at his sentencing hearing, such as that he was a hard-working family man who came from poverty and was discriminated against because he was a member of a nomadic ethnic group known as Roma, the document reads.

Washoe County Reno District Attorney Dick Gammick stated there was no consulate to contact because the former Yugoslavia where he was from was falling apart at the time.

The 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations proscribes that consular offices have the right to offer legal assistance to their nationals in prison.