Due to lack of qualified majority, the Supreme Court of Justice of Mexico rejects a project that proposed partially invalidating the judicial reform

( Spanish) – The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation rejected this Tuesday the draft sentence of one of its ministers that proposed to partially invalidate the judicial reform that Congress approved after the ministers who supported the initiative did not reach the qualified majority of eight votes that they needed. to approve the text of Judge Juan Luis González Alcántara Carranca.

Only seven of the eleven ministers supported González Alcántara’s proposal, while the other four opposed and therefore blocked the initiative. The Court indicates in a statement that the dismissal of the concepts of invalidity that were exposed by the challenges to the judicial reform “does not imply that any pronouncement is made on its validity.”

The rejection of the judicial reform that transforms the Judicial Branch was led by the judges identified with the ruling party—Lenia Batres, Yasmín Esquivel and Loretta Ortiz—, who were joined by Minister Alberto Pérez Dayán, who is usually part of the majority bloc in the highest court.

The action of unconstitutionality regarding the reform of the Judicial Branch had been promoted by the National Action and Institutional Revolutionary parties, deputies of the Citizen Movement in Zacatecas and the Democratic Unity Party of Coahuila.

González Alcántara’s draft ruling proposed maintaining the popular election of Supreme Court ministers and electoral magistrates, and that only district judges and magistrates be elected by popular vote.

Dayán, who provided the key vote to thwart the ruling, said at the beginning of his speech that “as much as I try to convince myself otherwise, resolving in the sense proposed by the proposal would be, I say this with all respect and exclusively in the jurisdiction of my own person, to respond to a folly irresponsibly brought to the supreme text, with another equivalent folly, by forcing the exercise of a power that was not conferred on me in the knowledge of an action of unconstitutionality.”

The judicial reform, which promotes the popular election of judges, was promoted by the former president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and promulgated on September 15 after its approval in the Congress of the Union and state Legislatures.