MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s first elected Supreme Court will be seated Monday and observers will be watching closely to see whether it will assert its independence from the governing party that held the country’s first judicial elections.
Just three of its nine justices have any experience on the high court, the rest are new, including the court’s president Hugo Aguilar, a lawyer who spent his career defending Indigenous rights.
The idea of judicial elections came from Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who frequently clashed with judges who challenged his agenda. He said judges elected by the people would be more accountable and less corrupt. Critics said electing judges risked politicizing the judiciary.
The election was supposed to be nonpartisan, but there were instances of voting pamphlets being distributed that identified candidates linked to the governing party. Many voters were simply overwhelmed by the 7,700 candidates vying for more than 2,600 judicial positions.
The Supreme Court, however, will receive special attention. It had been a counterweight at times to the popular López Obrador, whose Morena party also now holds majorities in both chambers of Congress.
“If the court wants to ensure its independence, it cannot rule in a partisan manner simply to support the government’s position,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “It must base its positions on law.”
The court has nearly 1,400 pending cases. Here are some that stand out:
Mandatory pretrial detention
It’s an issue that has brought broad international criticism to Mexico. López Obrador expanded the crimes for which someone is automatically jailed pending trial, including for some nonviolent crimes. The policy appears to violate international treaties which Mexico has signed.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Office and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights are among the bodies that have called for Mexico to repeal the policy.
The Mexican government says that it is a necessary tool to take on criminal activity and to protect judges.
But in a country where cases can drag on for years without a trial reaching a conclusion and only one in five of those charged are convicted, critics say the policy violates their rights. Four of every 10 people in Mexican prisons had not been convicted in 2023, according to the Federal and State Penitentiary Systems census.
The previous court declined to take it up in its final days.
Abortion access
While the previous court made historic rulings in 2021 and 2023 to expand access to abortion, the new court will likely have to weigh in on challenges to states that still have abortion on the books as a crime in their penal codes.
The court’s 2023 ruling invalidated all federal criminal penalties, saying they were an unconstitutional violation of women’s human rights. However, under Mexico’s legal system, the ruling did not apply to state statutes, which must be changed state by state.
Ana Cárdenas, director of justice projects in Mexico for the World Justice Project, said that uncertainty will prevail about whether the new court will preserve the same line of legal reasoning of recent years on the issue until the justices take up the cases.
Transgender rights
Previous courts have handed down decisions expanding transgender rights, for example by ruling that civil registry offices must allow transgender people to change the gender on their birth certificate through an administrative procedure without going before a judge.
The court extended that right to children in 2022. But according to Human Rights Watch, only seven of Mexico’s 32 states allow children to modify their identity documents to reflect their self-perceived gender identity.
Mining concessions
In 2023, Mexico’s governing party rammed changes to laws governing the mining sector through Congress with little to no debate.
The changes included reducing the maximum length of concessions from 50 to 30 years, and punishing speculation by allowing authorities to cancel concessions if no work is done on them within two years.
The mining industry, much of it foreign, has drawn complaints because of ecological damage, speculation and the fact that communities around the mines remain among the poorest in Mexico.
Challenges to those changes await the new court.
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