March 2nd |

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on Wednesday questioned the president of the Supreme Court of Justice for defending the autonomy of judges and affirmed that after she took office at the beginning of the year, “a wave of decisions in favor of alleged criminals” was unleashed.

In a veiled threat to the separation of powers, López Obrador reiterated his criticism of the Judicial Power and expressed his differences with the president of the highest court, Norma Piña, who last month advocated for judicial independence.

The president has already attacked independent regulatory agencies and cut funds to the National Electoral Institute, which has sparked intense debate in the country and questioning from the media, which has become a target in his morning conferences, and more recently from the U.S. State Department.

“Now that the new minister has arrived, she declares in an extreme formalism, as if the judges were all-powerful, that they are autonomous, that they can do whatever they want, and as soon as the new president arrived, a wave of resolutions in favor of alleged criminals is unleashed”, said the president during his morning conference.

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López Obrador harshly criticized the Council of the Federal Judiciary, which he called a “flower vase” for not exercising its function of investigating judges and affirmed that during the administration of Minister Arturo Zaldívar, who preceded Piña as president of the Supreme Court, “there was a little more vigilance towards judges”.

Sergio Méndez, lawyer of the civil organization Fundación para la Justicia, which defends the Rule of Law and supports victims of human rights violations, considered the governor’s pronouncement “wrong” and affirmed that his remarks can be assumed as a “form of pressure on the Judicial Power” that affects its independence.

“It is necessary to channel the disagreements in an institutional manner”, said Méndez, stating that it is delicate that the president generalizes with “vague” statements and added that a careful analysis should be made to know what led a judge to decide in a certain case and to evaluate the performance of the Prosecutor’s Office, because sometimes there are failures in the formulation of the accusations and in the evidence.

In January, a few days after Piña became the first woman to become president of the Supreme Court, López Obrador expressed his first disagreements with the minister by stating that with her arrival to the highest court “unfortunately” a reform of the Judicial Branch would not be possible and that she “has always voted against the initiatives that we have defended”.

The Mexican Supreme Court of Justice has been hit in the last months by the scandal generated after the report of the alleged plagiarism of the graduate thesis of Minister Yasmín Esquivel, pointed out as being close to López Obrador and who applied to head the highest court.

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A committee of the Facultad de Estudios Superiores Aragón of Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma (UNAM) determined in January that Esquivel’s 1987 thesis was a “substantial copy” of another submitted in 1986, but the school indicated that it had no rules that would allow it to withdraw her degree or professional license. Following this pronouncement, UNAM left the minister’s case in the hands of an Ethics Committee to consider possible further action.

A court in the Mexican capital agreed the day before to a precautionary measure of “definitive suspension” that prevents the UNAM Ethics Committee from issuing a resolution on Esquivel’s case until the amparo requested by the minister is resolved.

Recently, an investigation by the newspaper El País revealed that the minister had also plagiarized her doctoral thesis, but the university where she obtained that degree ruled out investigating the complaint.

In 2021, López Obrador promoted a reform of the Judicial Branch that extended the term of office of Zaldívar and the members of the Federal Judiciary Council for two years, but the change did not prosper because it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court itself.

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