Senators are meeting at an alternate headquarters as protesters block access to their regular meeting room in Mexico City on September 5. The protesters are protesting major judicial reforms.
Felix Marquez/AP
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Felix Marquez/AP
MEXICO CITY — Mexico is on the verge of making sweeping changes to its courts, including having judges elected by the public instead of appointed, in a major and controversial set of constitutional reforms.
Senators have supported the legislation in rose stage on Sunday, after being approved by the House of Representatives on Wednesday.
The proposed reforms have prompted strikes and protests by judges and other judicial staff, in one of Mexico’s biggest constitutional debates in years.
Here are the key things to understand about these reforms and why they’re so controversial.
Government pledges to eradicate corruption in courts
For nearly a year, outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has pushed a plan to overhaul the federal judiciary, and Claudia Sheinbaum, the president-elect who will take over in October, has championed reforms. Both have accused the courts of widespread corruption and said the changes they propose are significant.
The biggest proposal would change how federal judges are selected. Instead of working their way up the judiciary, the ruling party wants them elected by popular vote. Like presidents and lawmakers, the ruling party argues, judges from the Supreme Court down to local courts would have to run for office.
The plan also includes reforms such as ensuring no judicial officer earns more than the president.
Lawmaker Ricardo Monreal celebrates after the judicial reform was passed during a session at the alternate seat of the Mexican Congress in Sala de Armas, Mexico City, on September 4.
Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images
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Rodrigo Oropeza/AFP via Getty Images
Mexico’s June elections gave Sheinbaum the victory and the majority needed in Congress to amend the Constitution.
López Obrador and his protégé Sheinbaum argue that this would make the judiciary accountable to the people rather than to big business or organized crime.
After the House passed the reform 359-135, MP Ricardo Monreal celebrated.
“We believe we will end nepotism, corruption, bribery, conflicts of interest, the selling of justice to the highest bidder,” he said.
The judiciary is angry.
Judges and judicial officers went on strike since August 19.
Last week, they set up protest barricades in front of the federal courthouse and, just as the Mexican Congress was about to begin debating the measure, they surrounded the headquarters of the lower chambers in Mexico City to block the session.
“Democracy is in danger,” said José Fernando Migues Hernández, a Mexican justice official. told NPR.
Furthermore, federal courts have issued three injunctions blocking the reforms.
But ruling party lawmakers worked around the protesters and the ban, saying it violated their constitutional rights, and they moved forward. Instead of meeting in Congress, they announced they would debate it in a gym outside Mexico City. That’s where lawmakers from the lower house approved a series of measures.
This has been tried before
According to Mónica Castillejos-Aragón, a former secretary of the Mexican Supreme Court who now teaches comparative law at the University of California, Berkeley, under the 1857 Constitution, Mexico actually used to elect judges.
When the framers of the current constitution, adopted in 1917, discussed the judiciary, they called the election of judges “an inexplicable aberration.” They believed that elected judges would lead to corruption, so they reasoned that unlike the other two branches of government, the judiciary should be above politics.
“The founders expressed the need to establish an independent judiciary with security of tenure,” she said.
As the country moved 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 gained independence on paper, the court finally began issuing landmark opinions.
“For the first time in history, Mexican judges can interpret and expand the scope of rights recognized in the Mexican Constitution,” said Castillejos-Aragón.
In recent years, the court has struck down major presidential policies. For example, in April 2023, The Supreme Court has ruled that the National Guard — the large paramilitary force created by President López Obrador to patrol the country — cannot continue to be under the command of the military.
Judicial workers, judges and magistrates strike and protest in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on August 25.
Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images
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Guillermo Arias/AFP via Getty Images
Castillejos-Aragón said the new reforms would jeopardize the hard-won independence that has allowed the judiciary to check the presidency. She believes the current leadership is reacting to decisions like the National Guard’s ruling: The executive, now armed with a supermajority, wants to make sweeping changes without the courts holding it back.
Julio Ríos, who studies the judicial system at the Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico, said the only major democracy that elects judges at the federal level by popular vote is Bolivia. Bolivia’s reforms, implemented in 2009, diversified the courts but did not make them less corrupt, Ríos said. It has only politicized the courts and undermined public confidence in them.
However, according to constitutional lawyer Juan Carlos González Cancino, the changes Mexico is proposing are necessary.
He said the federal justice system is corrupt. Big tax cases or business cases are solved with a phone call or a bag of money, he said. In his mind, this is not about democracy. It is about factions of the Mexican elite fighting for power and the money that power generates.
“But that will end because this reform destroys that power structure,” he said.
Ultimately, he said, it doesn’t matter what the courts think of these reforms. The Mexican people spoke loud and clear when they gave the government the majority needed to reform the Constitution.
“The function of the judiciary must be to protect the will of the people, as expressed in the constitution,” he said.
