Why Mexico’s comprehensive justice reform matters: NPR

On September 5, senators in Mexico City hold a session in an alternative headquarters as protesters block access to their regular chambers. The demonstrators opposed comprehensive judicial reforms.

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MEXICO CITY — Mexico is on the verge of making major changes to its judiciary. As part of a comprehensive and controversial constitutional reform, judges will no longer be appointed but elected by the people.

Senators supported the bill in the commission phase on Sunday after it was approved by the lower house of Congress on Wednesday.

The planned reforms led to strikes and protests by judges and other judicial personnel. The debate has developed into one of the largest constitutional debates in Mexico in years.

Here you can find out everything you need to know about the reforms and why they are so controversial.

The government promises to eradicate corruption in court

For nearly a year, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been touting a plan to restructure the federal judiciary, and Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect who is set to take office in October, supports the reforms. Both accuse the courts of gross corruption and say their proposed changes are crucial.

The most important proposal would change the way federal judges are selected. Instead of working their way up through the judiciary, the ruling party wants them to be elected by popular vote. Like presidents and representatives, the ruling party argues, judges from the Supreme Court down to local courts would have to run for office.

The plan also includes reforms to ensure, for example, that no judicial employee earns more than the president.

Representative Ricardo Monreal celebrates the passage of the judicial reform during a session in an alternative seat of the Mexican Congress in the Sala de Armas in Mexico City on September 4.

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Sheinbaum won the June elections in Mexico and received the two-thirds majority in Congress needed to change the constitution.

López Obrador and his protégé Sheinbaum say this will result in the justice system being accountable to the people and not to big business or organized crime.

After the lower house of Congress passed the reform by 359 votes to 135, Congressman Ricardo Monreal celebrated.

“We believe we will put an end to nepotism, corruption, influence peddling, conflicts of interest and the selling out of the judiciary to the highest bidder,” he said.

The judiciary is outraged

Judges and judicial employees have been on strike since August 19.

Last week, they picketed federal courts and, just as the Mexican Congress was about to begin debating the bill, they surrounded the subcommittee headquarters in Mexico City to block the session.

“Democracy is in danger,” José Fernando Migues Hernández, a Mexican justice official, told NPR.

In addition, federal courts issued three preliminary injunctions to stop the reforms.

But the ruling party’s deputies circumvented the protests and decrees by claiming that they were a violation of their constitutional rights and carried on. Instead of meeting in Congress, they announced that they would debate in a gymnasium outside Mexico City. There, the deputies of the lower house passed the measures.

This has already been tried

According to Mónica Castillejos-Aragón, who worked as a trainee at the Supreme Court of Mexico and now teaches comparative law at the University of California at Berkeley, Mexico actually elected its own judges under its 1857 constitution.

When the authors of the current 1917 Constitution discussed the judiciary, they called the election of judges an “inexplicable aberration.” They believed that elected judges led to corruption, and therefore argued that the judiciary, unlike the other two branches of government, should be above politics.

“The founding fathers expressed the need to create an independent judiciary with job security,” she says.

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 2000s, nearly 80 years after it became independent on paper, the court finally began issuing landmark rulings.

“For the very first time in history, Mexican judges were able to interpret and expand the scope of rights already recognized in the Mexican Constitution,” says Castillejos-Aragón.

In recent years, courts have invalidated key presidential policy decisions. For example, in April 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Guard – a large paramilitary force created by President López Obrador to police the country – could not remain under military command.

On August 25, judicial employees, judges and justices of the peace in Tijuana in the Mexican state of Baja California go on strike and demonstrate.

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Castillejos-Aragón says the new reforms would jeopardize the hard-won independence that allowed the judiciary to control the presidency. She believes the current leadership is reacting to decisions like the National Guard ruling: the executive, which now has a two-thirds majority, wants to implement sweeping changes without the courts getting in the way.

The only major democracy that elects its federal judges by popular vote is Bolivia, says Julio Ríos, who studies the judiciary at Mexico’s Autonomous Technological Institute. Ríos says the Bolivian reform introduced in 2009 has made the courts more diverse but not less corrupt. He says it has only politicized the courts and weakened public trust in them.

However, according to constitutional lawyer Juan Carlos González Cancino, the changes proposed by Mexico are necessary.

He says the federal judiciary is corrupt. Big tax or economic cases are decided by phone call or with a bag full of money, he says. In his view, this is not about democracy. It is about factions of the Mexican elite fighting for power and the money that power brings.

“But that is ending because this reform is destroying this power structure,” he says.

Ultimately, he says, it doesn’t matter what the courts think about these reforms. The Mexican people made their opinion loud and clear when they gave the government the two-thirds majority needed to reform the constitution.

“The function of the judiciary should be to defend the will of the people as expressed in the constitution,” he says.