The reform of the Judiciary will diminish the capacity to litigate against projects that affect the environment, said Ricardo Ortega, Director of the Law Department of the Universidad Iberoamericana and member of the Observatory of this house of studies on the Justice System.
“The goal of strategic litigation was to have an independent court, which can limit political power, in some way be able to stop or prevent environmental damage, right? And I think that has been the dispute, for example, in the use of amparo lawsuits that were brought against the Mayan Train, which were raised, for example, in the Laguna Carpintero case, which was decided by the Supreme Court of Justice and which reflect the potential that environmental litigation can have to stop acts of authority that violate not only environmental issues, but issues of rights,” Ortega told Causa Natura Media.
In addition to this, the reform of the Amparo Act modified the possibility for judges to provide suspensions with general effects in amparo proceedings. Now only those who promote amparo can benefit from the suspension of a work, but not the rest of a community or society.
“If you realize it, the Judicial Power reform goes hand in hand with a reform of the Amparo Law and the reform of the Amparo Law directly to issues of its suspension. And the issues of suspension, with general effects, were fundamentally linked to environmental issues or megaprojects promoted by the government itself and that somehow began to be arrested in district courts and because that potential for resistance offered by the amparo trial will be eliminated by the reform of the amparo trial and also by the reform of the Judiciary,” said Ortega.
Lack of independence
The lack of guarantees of the impartiality of justice importers was addressed more broadly during the presentation of “The First 10 Lessons of Judicial Reform”, presented by the Observatory, made up of journalists and academics, this July 3rd at the facilities of the Mexican Center for Philanthropy.
At the conference, the Observatory's experts accused that they had succeeded in documenting the effect of accordions and had an effect on the appointment of judicial posts.
“This innovation with all the quotation marks in the world of accordions, an official Morena website where the official accordions were located, a website that was also widely documented to be 90% effective, that is, 90% of the candidates promoted on this page were the winners. We are talking about the fact that 28 of the 31 they were promoting won (in reference to the 31 most important positions in the federal judicial hierarchy),” said Daniel Moreno, founder of Animal Político and member of the Observatory.
The Observatory's efforts were also focused on the local level. Moreno said that the model of election according to the accordions was replicated, and the influence of the governors was documented. What he called an “irregularity” that determined the new configuration of the Superior Courts of Justice and the Courts of Discipline.
However, it was noted that there were cases such as the one in Veracruz, where accordions had limited effectiveness. “Just as in Tamaulipas, the governor was able to impose almost the totality, we see Rocío Nahle in Veracruz, who was unable to do so and who even lost not only key positions in the Superior Court and the Disciplinary Court, but this was reproduced in the election for mayors,” Moreno said.
As for those who appeared in the accordions, the question highlighted by the Observatory is: “In exchange for what?” , raising concerns about judicial independence.
The new configuration of the reform
Ana Laura Magaloni, a member of the Observatory, said that the weakest aspect of this reform is that it has covered people's everyday cases, which has caused uncertainty in the issues that bring ordinary citizens to court.
“If we want to imagine the future, we have to stabilize that quickly because of the kind of uncertainty that generates so much legal insecurity in conflicts that the powerful are worth a hat, but which will generate anger in leases, in alimony, in divorces, in child custody, in contracts. If we want to fix that quickly, we have to think about the first local instance,” Magaloni said.
Although experts find a background of political control in the reform, the big issues in this arena already had political influence without the need for reform, Magaloni explained.
“If it was about political control of justice, they already had it. In other words, political control of justice in the old model was easy. In other words, one more vote in the Supreme Court was enough, in the middle of this six-year term, they already had six members of the Supreme Court and they already controlled the Judicial Council, which guarantees you that any politically relevant case already has that reasoning. And that would have been enough,” said Magaloni.
For Ortega, this judicial reform stuck to the pillars of independence, which depends on several factors, including: who chooses the importers of justice, how their stability is guaranteed and how they are taken away.
“We don't mean to say that we lived in an ideal or paradigmatic justice system where problems of judicial independence were resolved. On the contrary, we know that the judiciary both at the federal and local levels faced enormous problems. However, what we can also determine today is that these problems are not resolved with judicial reform, but are worsened,” concluded Ortega.
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