According to officials on Monday, more than 18,000 people have registered online to contest for federal judgeships and Supreme Court seats in Mexico’s controversial new selection method. In the end, however, a random drawing will decide who is on the ballot.
In September, the ruling party pushed through a constitutional amendment that would require all federal judges to run for office, doing away with the current system in which lawyers and court personnel mostly advance via the ranks.
Numerous protests against the reforms have been organized by current court personnel and their allies, who claim that the changes are part of a ruling-party effort to undermine independent regulatory and monitoring organizations and erode checks and balances.
Candidates for federal judgeships and Supreme Court seats now only need to have a law degree, a 3.2 GPA, five years of work experience, and five letters of recommendation from friends or neighbors. That and a little bit of luck in the last illustration.
For the frequently highly specialized positions that can hear cases involving intellectual property, organized crime, and constitutional law, officials have disputed criticism that has characterized the procedure as hurried or unprofessional.
According to Arturo Zaldivar, a senior advisor to President Claudia Sheinbaum, the outcomes have been outstanding.
The plan calls for evaluation panels to have a little more than a month to go through thousands of resumes and narrow the field to no more than 10 applicants for each of the Supreme Court’s nine seats and 881 judgeships.
After that, on June 1, 1,793 randomly selected names will be on the ballot.
Many of the candidates on the ballot, according to critics, are unknown and may not have ever filed a case in the courts they are running for office.
According to Sergio M. ndez Silva, the legal coordinator for the civic organization Foundation for Justice, you don’t choose a surgeon or doctor for a procedure based on their popularity; rather, you choose them based on their technical proficiency, skill, and knowledge. The same is true for judges.
Critics caution that since candidates must now run for office, there is a possibility that political parties or drug cartels will fund them in an effort to appoint judges who are allied with them.
Concerns have also been raised about the potential lack of objectivity of the review committees that choose which candidates would be on the ballots. The legislative or executive branches, which are under the leadership of the ruling Morena party, appointed the majority of the committee members.
The current legal system, which is rife with nepotism, corruption, and a lack of accountability, has to be altered, according to some opponents.
According to Minerva Mart nez Garza, a scholar and former head of the human rights commission in the northern border state of Nuevo Leon, who has filed to compete for a Supreme Court seat, we need a legal system that produces results.
A significant portion of the jail population is made up of inmates awaiting trial because trials in Mexico can drag on for years and the ruling party has expanded the list of offenses for which bail is prohibited.
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