Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday narrowly passed sweeping changes to the courts that include having judges elected by the public rather than appointed, in a major and controversial set of constitutional reforms.
The approval came hours after hundreds of protesters broke into Mexico's Senate, forcing the body to take a temporary recess. The proposed reforms have led judges and other judicial staff to strike and protest, in what’s become one of Mexico’s biggest constitutional debates in years.
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For nearly a year, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been promoting a plan to remake the federal judiciary and Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect, due to take over in October, backs the reforms. Both accuse the courts of gross corruption and say their changes are crucial.
The biggest proposal changes how federal judges are selected. Instead of working their way up the judiciary, the governing party wants them to be elected by popular vote. Like presidents and lawmakers, the governing party reasoned, judges from the Supreme Court on down to local courts will have to run for office.
The plan also includes reforms like making sure no judicial worker makes more than the president.
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Judges and judicial staff have been on strike since Aug. 19.
Last week, they formed picket lines in front of federal courthouses and just as the Mexican Congress was set to begin debating the measure, they surrounded the lower bodies’ headquarters in Mexico City to block the session.
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What’s more, federal courts had issued three injunctions in an attempt to stop the reforms.
But governing party lawmakers worked around the protesters and injunctions, saying they were an infringement of their constitutional rights, and they pressed on. Instead of meeting at Congress, they announced they would debate at a gym outside Mexico City. That’s where legislators from the lower house approved the raft of measures.
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As the country took steps toward democracy in the 1990s, it also began appointing judges the way the United States does at the federal level. (Some U.S. states elect local judges.) And in the early 2000’s, nearly 80 years after it became independent on paper, the court finally began issuing landmark opinions.
“For the very first time in history, the Mexican judges were able to interpret and expand the scope of the rights already recognized in the Mexican Constitution,” Castillejos-Aragón says.
In recent years, the courts have struck down key policies of the president. For instance, in April 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Guard — a large paramilitary force created by President López Obrador to patrol the country — could not remain under military command.
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The only big democracy to elect judges at the federal level by popular vote is Bolivia, says Julio Ríos, who studies judiciaries at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. According to Ríos, the Bolivian reform, instituted in 2009, did diversify the courts but it did not make them any less corrupt. He says it just politicized the courts and weakened the public’s confidence in them.
However, according to constitutional lawyer Juan Carlos González Cancino, Mexico’s changes are necessary.
He says the federal judiciary is corrupt. Big tax cases or business cases get decided with a phone call or a bag of money, he says. In his mind, this is not about democracy. It's about factions of the Mexican elite fighting for power and the money that power begets.
From the article (a couple weeks old):
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