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Mexico’s Obrador set to enact divisive judicial reforms: What happens next?
Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is expected to enact controversial judicial reforms on Sunday, just ahead of Mexico’s Independence Day celebrations.
The reforms have sparked mixed reactions. Supporters argue they will make judges more accountable and praise the opportunity for the public to vote for those responsible for delivering justice. Critics contend this undermines the nation’s system of checks and balances by eroding the independence of the judiciary.
Here’s what we know as Mexico prepares to implement the reforms.
What is the main purpose of Mexico’s judicial reforms?
The law aims to transform the judiciary from an appointment-based system, primarily focused on their training and qualifications, to one where judges are elected by voters.
According to the government, the main goal of these reforms is to eliminate corruption from Mexico’s judiciary and ensure that it responds to the will of the people.
A bill to bring about the changes was approved by two-thirds of the upper house of parliament on Wednesday, following a contentious all-night debate. The reforms were approved by the lower house earlier this month.
All judges, both federal and state, from the lower rank to the Supreme Court, will be elected by citizens. There are nearly 7,000 positions in total.
The requirements to become a judge have also been reduced.
A law degree and five years of experience are sufficient for all judges except for those serving on the Supreme Court, where 10 years experience is required.
The reforms will also replace professional exams that are currently used to evaluate candidates. The new reform requires good grades and letters of recommendation.
The candidates must provide five letters from neighbours, colleagues or others vouching for their suitability for the role. The candidates are also required to submit an essay of three pages where they justify the reasons for their application.
The first election, covering about half of the judges, is expected to take place in June 2025. The rest should coincide with the regular elections of 2027. However, many details on how the voting will be organised are still unclear.
When these reforms take place, current judges – approximately 7,000 of them – will lose their positions but will then have the opportunity to run as candidates. However, many of the newly elected judges could step into specialised courtrooms they have never previously encountered, resulting in a potentially very challenging role.
How are judges currently selected in Mexico?
Judges currently advance to positions in higher courts through periodic reviews.
For the Supreme Court, the upper house of parliament selects its members from a shortlist proposed by the president.
“It is a very important reform,” Lopez Obrador said on Thursday. “It reaffirms that in Mexico there is a true democracy, where the people elect their representatives … not the elites … not the oligarchy. Everyone, every citizen,” he added.
The Supreme Court is the final arbiter on whether laws and the authorities adhere to the Constitution.
Is there a problem with justice in the country?
Experts recognise that the current judicial system has problems with corruption. Surveys also suggest that Mexicans have little to no confidence in the judicial system.
However, experts also concur that the problems are more pronounced at the local level rather than at the federal.
“There were no known major corruption cases [at the federal level],” Arturo Ramos Sobarzo, the director of the Center for Investigation and Legal Informatics at Mexico City’s Escuela Libre de Derecho, told Al Jazeera. “Of course, there were problems, and they were addressed. The criticism was mostly at the local level. There, the salaries were not as good, and there was a more critical view of the judiciary.”
According to Mexico Evalua, a think tank that evaluates government policies, Mexico’s justice system suffered from a very high level of impunity in 2022. The index used allows for identifying the system’s ability to provide an effective response to the cases it handles. A high level of impunity means a low rate of both appropriate convictions and cases being brought to court.
The crimes with the highest level of impunity, according to the report, were intentional homicides, femicides, sexual abuse, disappearances and kidnappings.
In the case of intentional homicide, the national average of impunity was 95.7 percent.
But, according to research, it is not just a question of cases before courts not yielding justice – allegedly due to corrupt judges. In Mexico, more than 90 percent of crimes are never brought to court.
One of the main challenges has to do with prosecutors’ willingness and capacity to investigate.
Nepotism is another significant issue and, according to some experts, a major concern within the judicial system. A recent report revealed that 37 percent of judiciary officials have at least one family member employed in the judiciary.
With these challenges, why are these reforms so controversial?
Experts say that the reform does not address the fundamental issues with the existing structure and prosecutors, who often lack adequate training and are frequently overwhelmed by their workload.
They also highlight that the new voting process for judges remains unclear and fraught with challenges.
Will voters take the time to research and review the resumes of the hundreds of relatively unknown candidates who could contest each position? Who will fund the candidates’ election campaigns? How many candidates will each ballot have on it? These are all unanswered questions.
“There’s sufficient people that consider that the judicial system doesn’t work well in Mexico,” Miguel Angel Toro Rios, the dean of the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tecnologico de Monterrey, a Monterrey-based university, told Al Jazeera.
He noted that the reforms do not address the main issues in the judicial system, prosecutors, the police or the National Guard.
Those problems can include corruption and, in many cases, chronic underfunding.
“If all of those things remain the same and the only thing you have is different judges… it’s not necessarily a given that they will be better equipped at dealing with these things. It seems like a lot of a hassle for a very limited policy gain,” Toros Rios explained.
Experts also fear this new process could be tainted by corruption.
“Citizens primarily turn to local state courts for issues like femicides or civil and criminal matters,” Adriana Delgado, the director of Azteca Opinion at TV Azteca, a Mexican multimedia conglomerate, told Al Jazeera.
“However, nothing gets resolved, and this judiciary reform has been marred by political rather than technical debates.”
“The reform only changes how judges and magistrates are elected by popular vote, which raises concerns about the potential infiltration of organised crime or the influence of political and economic interest groups on the selection process,” Delgado added.
Could voting affect the work of the judges?
According to lawyer Ramos Sobarzo, these reforms place the judicial system in a very challenging position.
For the Supreme Court of Justice, elected judges would serve terms of eight, 11, and 14 years, depending on the voting results. Those with the most votes will remain in office for a longer period.
“We are very concerned because it will undermine judicial independence in many ways as it will leave some or much of it to popularity,” he added.
“What is going to happen … in the seventh and eighth years, they will start thinking about how to get re-elected.”
“At that point, they might decide not based on the incentives of analysing the case files but on gaining popularity from a particular case. They will decide how it will be received by public opinion,” he explained.
The governing party argues that allowing voters to choose would make judges more accountable to the public and make it easier to punish problematic ones.
Besides the voting of the judges, what else are the reforms addressing?
The reforms will introduce “anonymous judges” to oversee organised crime cases, shielding their identities to protect them from reprisals, threats or pressure.
They will also reduce the size of the Supreme Court from 11 justices to nine.
They would also create a judicial disciplinary committee with the authority to address not only issues of judicial misconduct such as bribery, mishandling of evidence, or undue delays but also to investigate judges’ legal reasoning.
This aspect is also troubling to experts.
“We are very concerned about this change because it does not establish clear rules. It provides a very easy and free process for initiating proceedings against federal judges and magistrates, and we believe this will impact judicial independence. A judge might be ruling against a government appointment, and this court [the disciplinary committee] could intervene,” Sobarzo explained.
In the short term, what impact will this have on the judicial system in Mexico?
It is a big change in a short period of time.
In less than a year, on June 1, the election for half of the entire judiciary, including the complete Supreme Court, will take place.
Besides the challenge of organising such a big election, experts say that Mexicans might also feel an immediate impact on justice once this reform is in place.
“I do think they will feel the immediate impact, because this reform likely implies a salary reduction for members of the judiciary,” Sobarzo said.
The reform proposes that no minister, magistrate, or judge can earn a salary higher than that of the president.
According to reports, the typical salary for a member of the Supreme Court of Justice is above $10,000 a month. In 2018, Lopez Obrador said the president’s salary was about $5,613 monthly.
“We believe that, eventually, the best people will no longer be there,” Sobarzo explained.
But Toros Rios said that not much might change for everyday citizens and their legal disputes.
“It is not entirely obvious that everyday citizens will be affected,” Toros Rio said.
“Except if things benefit certain real powerful interest groups… they will probably be able to convince or fund the campaign of some of these judges, such that those judges will rule in favour of a lot of them,” he added.
Are there other concerns?
Amid the debates and controversy over the judicial reforms, the markets have fluctuated and some analysts have warned that uncertainty over the country’s legal system could spook potential investors.
The United States, Mexico’s largest trading partner, has also expressed concerns over the reforms, calling them “a major risk” to Mexico’s democracy. Canada, Mexico’s second-largest trading partner, has also said that investors fear the reform could lead to instability.
However, other experts believe the reforms will not affect Mexico’s potential as an investment destination.
“We’ve seen businesses around the world operate in some of the worst countries in terms of human rights, government quality and authoritarian regimes. They don’t care, as long as there are profits to be made and they have certainty about the rules,” Toros Rios said.
“When there’s uncertainty about the rules, then is when investors stop investing. Once the new rules are set, and more or less investors have an idea of what they’re dealing with, things will be more or less the same [as] what they’ve been here right now,” he added.
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The Trump administration is rolling out what experts describe as the most significant expansion of U.S. sanctions on Cuba in decades.
The administration is attempting what supporters say is the first broad application of Cuba-related secondary sanctions against foreign firms, aiming not only at Havana itself but also at foreign companies and banks that continue doing business with the island’s military-linked economic empire.
The new framework, established under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump May 1, applies pressure beyond U.S. companies for the first time, threatening foreign firms with sanctions exposure if they continue operating in key sectors of the Cuban economy linked to Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., or GAESA.
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Supporters say the move closes a loophole that allowed foreign investors to sustain Cuba’s communist regime while the longstanding U.S. embargo largely restricted Americans.
Critics argue the measures risk worsening an already severe humanitarian crisis on the island without meaningfully weakening the government.
Demonstrators attempt to burn the Communist Party headquarters in Morón, Cuba, after authorities allegedly opened fire on protesters without warning. (Obtained by Fox News Digital)
“At the top of the month, what the Trump administration did was for the first time extend the application of U.S. sanctions from just prohibiting trade between U.S. firms and U.S. persons and the Cuban island to third-party countries and enablers,” Max Meizlish, a former Treasury Department official now serving as a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“For the first time ever in a truly unprecedented fashion, that’s the same logic that the administration is now applying to Cuba,” he said.
The sanctions focus heavily on GAESA, a sprawling military-linked conglomerate that analysts estimate controls between 40% and 70% of Cuba’s economy, including tourism, mining, retail, ports and financial services.
A recent Foundation for Defense of Democracies report authored by Meizlish and Connor Pfeiffer argued that foreign companies doing business in Cuba are effectively helping sustain the regime’s military and political leadership.
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An image of Fidel and Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel, Cuba’s president and first secretary of the Communist Party, is displayed in a billboard in Havana, April 12, 2023. (Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)
The State Department sanctioned GAESA and several affiliated entities in May under the new authorities, opening the door for potential penalties against foreign companies and financial institutions that continue dealings with them after a June 5 wind-down deadline.
Meizlish argued previous sanctions regimes failed because they isolated American companies while allowing foreign actors to continue financing the Cuban state.
“There’s a lot of Spanish firms, for instance, that have invested millions of dollars in luxury hotel properties, villa properties in Cuba that partner with GAESA, all funding this military enterprise at the expense of the Cuban people,” he said.
He also pointed to Canadian involvement in Cuba’s nickel and cobalt sectors, saying foreign investment has generated “huge amounts of money for the regime.”
“A lot of people think about the U.S. embargo over the years is actually being responsible for a lot of the problems on the Cuban island, but they don’t give consideration to the fact that GAESA, this newly sanctioned entity, has been sitting on an estimated $20 billion in assets and cash over the year while depriving the people of Cuba,” Meizlish told Fox News Digital.
But critics of the policy warn the economic fallout could land the hardest on ordinary Cubans.
William LeoGrande, a longtime Cuba expert at American University, said the May 1 measures represent a major escalation because they specifically target foreign businesses rather than just Americans and aim to deter foreign companies from doing business with GAESA by threatening sanctions exposure.
LeoGrande acknowledged the measures could deprive the Cuban government of revenue but argued the broader population is likely to suffer most.
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A woman with her son signals a car on a dark street during a blackout in Bauta municipality, Artemisa province, Cuba, on March 18, 2024. (Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)
“This would potentially deprive the Cuban government of funds, but the impact will fall mainly on ordinary citizens because it means the government has fewer resources to import food, medicine and fuel,” he said.
The debate comes as Cuba faces its deepest economic and humanitarian crisis in years.
The World Food Programme says food insecurity is worsening amid fuel shortages, inflation and declining access to imported goods, while U.N. officials have warned that electricity shortages and blackouts are disrupting hospitals, vaccination programs and food distribution networks across the island.
LeoGrande also warned tougher sanctions could contribute to another migration crisis.
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Protesters take to the streets in Cuba over food and electricity shortages. (Reuters)
“Another unintended effect is that by making living conditions in Cuba even more desperate, tougher sanctions could trigger a mass migration like we saw in 1980 or 1994,” LeoGrande said.
On background, a U.S. official rejected arguments that American sanctions are responsible for Cuba’s humanitarian crisis.
“The suffering of the Cuban people is not caused by the U.S. embargo but by the Cuban dictatorship’s failed Communist policies and human rights violations,” the official told Fox News Digital. “The embargo does not prohibit Cuba’s access to world markets or trade with third countries.”
The official added that U.S. law explicitly permits exports of food, medicine and medical equipment to Cuba and accused the regime of hiding “billions in overseas bank accounts instead of investing in electricity, infrastructure and the daily needs of its people.”
The debate mirrors long-standing arguments surrounding U.S. sanctions on countries like Iran and Venezuela, where supporters view economic pressure as a tool to weaken authoritarian governments while critics argue regimes often survive and civilians absorb the economic damage.
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Meizlish argued sanctions should not be judged simply by whether they immediately topple governments.
“The problem isn’t that the embargo went too far,” he said. “It’s that it didn’t go far enough.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Cuban Embassy in Washington for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The United States House of Representatives has passed a resolution to rein in President Donald Trump’s powers to attack Iran without congressional authorisation.
Four Republicans joined Democrats to pass the bill in a vote of 215 to 208 on Wednesday in Washington, DC.
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While the resolution is unlikely to become law, it represents a stark rebuke against Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran on February 28, launching an ongoing conflict that will reach its 100th day on Saturday.
Trump did not seek congressional approval for the war, which he has attempted to label as a “skirmish” or a “short-term excursion”.
The Republican leader’s repeated use of military force abroad has frustrated some leaders in Congress, a body which the Constitution solely imbued with the power to declare war.
Wednesday’s vote marked the fourth time this year that the House has voted on a war powers resolution to force Trump to seek congressional backing for his military actions against Iran.
It is the first time, however, that the resolution has been successful in the House. Its passage comes after a political manoeuvre that some interpreted as a Republican effort to scuttle the bill.
A divide among Republicans
A vote on the war powers resolution was expected on May 21, the eve of Congress’s Memorial Day recess.
But the vote was cancelled, despite indications that the resolution would succeed with Republican support. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican and close Trump ally, chose to adjourn the chamber early.
The resolution, however, was picked up again after the recess. In Wednesday’s vote, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Thomas Massie of Kentucky splintered away from the Republican establishment to pass the bill.
Massie, whose re-election bid Trump actively campaigned against, marked the occasion with a message on social media.
“The Iran War Powers Resolution that I cosponsored (opposing the war) just passed the House of Representatives,” Massie wrote. “The People’s House is sending a message: end this war.”
Massie will not be returning to Congress next year. He was defeated last month in his local Republican Party primary by a Trump-backed opponent, Ed Gallrein.
Barrett, whose House seat is vulnerable to a Democratic takeover in November’s midterms, explained his vote by arguing that Trump had exceeded his mandate.
“Congress has the exclusive authority under the Constitution to declare war and authorize the use of force. The War Powers Act of 1973 delegates some of that authority to the president for a limited period of time,” Barrett, an army veteran, wrote.
“That authority has expired, and my support of this resolution tonight is consistent with my belief that it is time for Congress to decide the scope of the mission and the appropriate limits on the use of force in Iran.”
Democrats call on Senate to act
While Trump’s war on Iran has divided House Republicans, the chamber’s Democrats were unanimous in their backing of the war powers resolution. After the vote, several urged their colleagues in the Senate to swiftly pass the measure.
“We passed an Iran War Powers Resolution in the House to rein in Trump and end his unauthorized, reckless war,” Representative Ayanna Pressley, a progressive from Massachusetts, wrote on social media. “The Senate must immediately follow suit and act to end this war.”
Representative Shontel Brown of Ohio, meanwhile, underscored the constitutional issues raised by Trump’s war, as well as its cost.
“Congress holds the power to declare war—not the executive branch,” she said in a post. “After months of chaos, higher costs, and wasted resources, it is time to end Trump’s costly war in Iran NOW.”
The war on Iran has been costly for the US, with the Pentagon estimating in May that $29bn had been spent so far.
Some analysts consider this an undercount, though. In April, a public finance expert at Harvard University projected that the price tag could soar to more than $1 trillion.
There are also concerns that the war has cost the US in terms of military preparedness.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US-based research institute, issued a report in April warning that certain critical munitions have run low, with the number used outstripping the number of anticipated replacements.
They include Tomahawk missiles, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems (THAADs) and Precision Strike missiles (PrSMs).
Public backlash growing
US voters broadly disapprove of the US-Israel war against Iran. A poll last month from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that 60 percent of US citizens disapprove of Trump’s approach to the war, a jump from 54 percent in March.
The increase was even seen among Republicans. While 15 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of the war in March, the number has since increased to 22 percent.
Among US citizens overall, 61 percent found that the war had done “more harm than good”.
The growing disapproval reflects, in part, the economic backlash to the war, which has sent prices for fuel and other products like agricultural fertiliser skyrocketing.
The Trump administration has also faced criticism for the unprovoked nature of the February 28 attack, though the president and his allies have argued the war was necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
More than 3,400 people have died in Iran during the war. At least 13 US soldiers have also been killed in the conflict, which spilled into nearby countries, with deaths reported across the region.
Wednesday’s House war powers resolution now proceeds to the Senate, which passed a similar bill in May.
But it faces an uphill battle overall, as Trump is likely to veto any attempt to curtail his military powers.
Only a bill passed with a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate can overcome a presidential veto. So far, neither the Senate’s version, nor the House’s, has breached that threshold.
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