2023-09-03 05:01:00
The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced that he will send to Congress a draft constitutional reform so that judges and magistrates, including members of the Supreme Court of Justice, a step with which it seeks to “clean up” the sector.
“Just as deputies, senators, and the President of the Republic are elected, so judges, magistrates and ministers must be elected,” with the purpose of eliminating “complicity and conflicts of interest,” López Obrador said.
The announcement was part of his fifth annual management report, which he made this Friday from the coastal city of Campeche. Several governors and officials and the United States ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, listened to him.
“Clean up the Judiciary”
“I am going to propose a constitutional reform initiative to cleanse the Judiciary of complicity, conflicts of interest, unspeakable coexistence, corruption and waste of resources. It is essential and urgent that judges, magistrates and ministers be directly elected by the people” , stressed the president.
Those posts should not be elected by “the elite of Mexico’s economic and political power,” the president said. “Just as municipal presidents, men or women, governors, local and federal deputies, senators, the President are elected… that is how judges, magistrates and ministers must be elected,” he insisted.
López Obrador stressed that the task of the “providers of justice” is to serve the people and “not, as is the case now, operating under the banner of benefiting groups or political, economic factions and even under the banner of criminal interests.”
conflict of powers
The announcement takes up an initiative that the president himself had already launched last May, after the Court annulled a reform promoted by the ruling party that made restrictions on electoral processes more flexible, ahead of the 2024 presidential elections.
At that time, 9 of the 11 members of the Court invalidated changes to two laws that regulated the participation of officials in campaigns and official propaganda, although for formal reasons and without assessing the substantive issue.
The Executive considered at that time that the judicial decision violates the separation of powers, since the highest court does not have “popular legitimacy” to restrict the constitutional powers of Congress.
The plan is advanced
López Obrador’s announcement seems to advance a plan that, initially, he had for later: in May he revealed that he would send the reform proposal in September 2024, so that it could be discussed in the brief period in which the new conformation of the two would coincide. Chambers of Parliament – arisen from the elections of June 2 of that year – with what remains of its mandate, which expires on October 1.
Mexico already had an indirect mechanism for the election of the Court: in the Constitution of 1857, of liberal ideology, it was established that citizens with the right to vote elected delegates who, in turn, designated the members of the highest court.
They then lasted six years in office, instead of the current 15 years of the ministers who come to court after being appointed by the President and then endorsed by two thirds of the Senate.
The current composition has a majority of seven ministers proposed by the then presidents Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto, including the president of the court, and four nominated by López Obrador.
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