16 September 2024
Mexico’s Constitutional Democracy Under Threat
The final act of Mexican President López Obrador will be in collaboration with the president-elect Claudia Sheinbaum and the newly elected Congress. Among other things, in a move that goes beyond anything found in other prominent backsliding states such as Hungary or Poland, it introduces the popular election of all sitting judges across the Federal Judiciary, including Supreme Court Justices, every 9 and 12 years respectively. In an open letter, legal scholars, judges, policymakers and practitioners from various regions of the world have expressed deep concern over the potential consequences that the popular election of judges may have on judicial independence, the rule of law, and the safeguarding of rights and freedoms in Mexico. Continue reading >>
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18 April 2023
Whispers of Change (Vol. II)
Mexico’s prolonged refusal to eliminate mandatory preventive detention from its legal system has slowly but steadily contributed to the rising tension between the Mexican Supreme Court, the Mexican State, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Following both Courts’ recent decisions on the case of García Rodríguez y Alpízar Ortíz v. México (both have recently decided cases concerning virtually the same set of facts with notoriously varying outcomes), the discussion heats as it now relates to one of the most relevant inquiries of modern constitutional study: judicial review of constitutional provisions and amendments. Continue reading >>
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22 September 2022
Whispers of Change
Until recently, a debate on Mexico’s Supreme Court's power to scrutinize the constitutionality of constitutional provisions seemed largely distant. But for the first time in its history, the Supreme Court discussed a draft opinion of one of its members calling for the inapplicability of Article 19 of the Mexican Constitution, which provides the so-called mandatory preventive imprisonment as an automatic measure when investigating specific felonies. With the future of Mexican constitutionalism pending from this decision, the stakes are as high as they have ever been. Continue reading >>
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