World
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.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
President Donald Trump said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to reach an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, even as Moscow warned Wednesday that Western troops deployed to enforce any eventual peace deal would become Russian military targets.
“I say, ‘Vladimir, it’s time for you to stop. It’s time for this war to end,’” Trump told Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst in an interview released Tuesday.
Trump said he believed Putin was “ready to make a deal” to end the fighting.
ANOTHER NATO ALLY SIGNS ONTO EUROPEAN NUCLEAR UMBRELLA AS CONTINENT BOOSTS SELF-DEFENSE
Meanwhile, fighting continued across Ukraine and Russian-occupied territory.
The intensifying drone war has forced both militaries to search for additional ways to intercept unmanned aircraft, sometimes using weapons designed decades before modern drones emerged.
A video supplied by East2West shows a Russian soldier apparently losing control of a Soviet-era YakB-12.7 rotary machine gun mounted on an improvised ground platform.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump meet in 2019, before their relationship began to sour. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
The weapon begins spinning violently, dragging the service member around before throwing him several yards from the mounting. Another soldier ducks as the gun swings in his direction.
East2West reported that no one was injured, though Fox News Digital has not independently verified the location, date or circumstances of the footage.
The four-barrel machine gun was originally developed for use aboard the Soviet-designed Mi-24 Hind attack helicopter. Russian forces have reportedly attempted to repurpose such weapons as ground-based defenses against Ukrainian drones, East2West news reported.
TRUMP SAYS US WILL LET UKRAINE MAKE PATRIOT MISSILES IN MAJOR POLICY SHIFT
An explosion lights up the sky over the city during a Russian missile and drone strike amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine in Kyiv July 2, 2026. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
On Wednesday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said any multinational force deployed by Ukraine’s allies after a ceasefire would be unacceptable to Moscow.
“We would regard such units as legitimate military targets,” Zakharova said, according to a Reuters report published Wednesday.
Members of the Western “coalition of the willing” reaffirmed at a meeting in Paris this week that they intend to deploy a multinational force after hostilities end. The proposed force would seek to reassure Ukraine and help Kyiv rebuild its military.
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP
Ukraine’s military said Wednesday that its forces struck the Balaklava thermal power station in Russian-occupied Crimea, a facility that accounts for nearly half of the peninsula’s electricity generation, according to Reuters.
Russia, meanwhile, launched another major drone and missile attack against Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, killing three people, regional Governor Oleh Kiper said. He said civilian, industrial and port infrastructure had been targeted during five consecutive days of Russian attacks.
Emergency services personnel work to extinguish a vehicle fire after a Russian drone attack in the Kyiv region, Ukraine, May 5, 2026. (Ukrainian Emergency Service/AP)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also said Wednesday that Ukraine expects to develop the technical capability to manufacture missiles for U.S.-made Patriot air-defense systems by the end of 2026.
Reuters contributed to this story.
Monitor ranks Toronto as having the worst air quality on earth, surpassing Kinshasa, DR Congo, and New Delhi, India.
Published On 16 Jul 2026
Toronto’s air quality has ranked the worst among all major cities in the world as smoke from wildfires in northwestern Ontario blankets the skies and spreads into the northeastern United States, triggering multiple health warnings and evacuations.
Wildfires continued burning through sparsely populated areas hundreds of miles from Toronto, Canada’s largest city, on Wednesday, sending smoke over a wide area, although cities in the area are not being threatened.
list of 3 itemsend of listRecommended Stories
Environment Canada reported an Air Quality Health Index reading of 10+, classified as “very high risk”, for Toronto. Forecasts suggested that hazardous conditions could persist through Thursday night.
IQAir, a Swiss air quality technology company, ranked Toronto as having the worst air quality across the globe, surpassing the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Kinshasa and India’s New Delhi.
“The biggest contributor to Toronto’s spike in air pollution right now is wildfires, though the higher-than-average temperatures are also playing a role,” Armen Araradian of IQAir told the AFP news agency.
While this year’s wildfire season in Canada has been fairly muted compared with recent years, there are more than 800 active fires nationwide.
A video that went viral on social media showed a Canadian National train surrounded by fire near Armstrong, Ontario. Canadian National employees in the area and residents of Armstrong were evacuated on Monday night, the railroad operator said in a statement. It suspended rail operations near Armstrong as a precaution.
Smoke from the wildfires also worsened air quality across the border in the US, with the states of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire particularly affected.
Authorities in New York City have issued an alert over unhealthy air quality, urging residents to reduce strenuous outdoor activity and take extra breaks if they are outside on Wednesday and Thursday.
The National Weather Service said smoke could linger until the end of the week.
“We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for New York City. We probably haven’t seen the worst of it yet for the Great Lakes and upstate, and New England yet either,” Dan Westervelt, Lamont associate research professor at Columbia University, told the Reuters news agency.
More than 80,000 people are expected to attend the FIFA World Cup final at an open-air stadium in New Jersey on Sunday, with another 50,000 planning to watch the game from New York City’s Central Park, where skies appeared hazy.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul urged people, especially those with health conditions, to exercise caution.
The Canadian government has said that wildfire season began more slowly this year than in 2023 or 2025 – the two worst seasons for wildfires – but warned that fires were likely, due to warmer-than-usual temperatures across the country.
It said some 835 active fires were burning across the country on Wednesday, with 112 considered out of control, and most in the central provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.
They have burned 1.9 million hectares (4.7 million acres) so far.
Greg Evans, a professor of chemical engineering and applied chemistry at the University of Toronto, said the city had been simultaneously hit with severe heat and wildfire smoke.
“I expect that this will occur more frequently over the coming decades, so cities and residents need to prepare for this in the future,” he said.
Getting home, and turning back the clock, has long been at the root of Christopher Nolan’s films. The astronauts of “Interstellar” painstakingly lose 23 years in space travel, almost the same length of time Odysseus is away from home in “The Odyssey”: a decade fighting the Trojan War, a decade trying to return to Ithaca.
So, to a remarkable degree, Nolan’s “The Odyssey” — faithful as it is to Homer’s epic poem — feels, down to its nonlinear DNA, like a Nolan movie. The authorship of the epic poem, dated to the 7th or 8th century BC, is complex. But no one could question the maker of this “Odyssey,” an earthy, existential epic that ravishingly melds the storytelling of antiquity with contemporary IMAX-sized bravado.
As a story about a man whose cunning offends the gods, “The Odyssey” feels very much like a companion piece, if not a downright sequel, to “Oppenheimer.” Odysseus (Matt Damon, in the role of his life) is increasingly racked with guilt for the violence and death he’s wrought after his ingenuity led to the sacking of Troy.
This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon, as Odysseus, in a scene from “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)
The arrival of any new Nolan spectacle inevitably leads to its own kind of assault, and avalanches of “masterpiece” proclamations. (I’m notinnocent.) But while “The Odyssey,” Nolan’s first film shot entirely with IMAX cameras, doesn’t skimp on grandiosity, it works surprisingly well as a simpler, human-sized tale.
The journey — you may have heard, it’s about the journey — is sometimes a little clunky, and the sheer Nolan-ness of the production, not to mention the historic nature of the tale, inevitably saps it of some freshness. You could make a credible case that Nolan has already made a movie about a guy trying to reach his family through strata of mind-warping illusion, and it’s called “Inception.” Such is the trouble with urtexts.
But “The Odyssey” is rarely not transfixing, and it’s a ripping adventure story, besides. At the least, it’s the definitive big-screen adaptation of one of literature’s oldest tales — a not-too-shabby accomplishment for a filmmaker of restless ambition.
It’s not until Book 5 that Odysseus enters Homer’s poem, and Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, likewise begins in Ithaca. There, Odysseus’ home is overrun by feasting suitors in pursuit of his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). Foremost among them is Antinous, who’s played with sleazy perfection by Robert Pattinson. For an actor often (pleasingly) at odds with the movies around him, Pattinson has never slid more seamlessly into a part.
Telemachus (Tom Holland, also well-cast), the youthful son of Penelope and Odysseus, resolves to go in search of his father. Meanwhile, we catch up with Odysseus, weathered and white-bearded, following the fall of Troy. His forced conscription, by Agamemnon, is shown in flashbacks. Agamemnon is depicted with an imposing Darth Vader-like presence and played by Benny Safdie, but the real star is his hulking, mohawked helmet.
This image released by Universal Pictures shows, from left, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus, in a scene from “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)
Such vivid details abound in Nolan’s richly textured film. The simple rocking of Odysseus’ longship, off the Mediterranean coast, is glorious. Some of Nolan’s and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s most impressive work has come when they’re faced with the elements (as in “Dunkirk” ). And “The Odyssey” is flooded with stormy seas and enchanted isles. If anything, the movie could have gone further; I was promised rosy-fingered dawns.
The first line of Homer’s poem, as translated by Emily Wilson (the version Nolan leaned on), refers to Odysseus as “a complicated man.” James Joyce, whose “Ulysses” was based on “The Odyssey,” once noted that while Hamlet is merely a son, Ulysses, or Odysseus, is a father, a husband, a lover and a warrior. In short, he’s an Everyman, albeit an especially smart one. And Damon, the most amiable of Everymen, proves especially attuned to the multifaceted nature of the archetypal hero.
We meet him first as a soldier, leading a small group of ships away from Agamemnon’s fleet, setting a southerly course with his second-in-command Eurylochus (an excellent Himesh Patel). Their route takes them on a series of episodic quests: a cave encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops; a pine forest attack by the man-eating giants, the Laestrygonians; a meal with the witch Circe (Samantha Morton); and Odysseus’ seven-year interlude with the sea nymph Calypso (a beguilingly sincere Charlize Theron).
This image released by Universal Pictures shows a scene from “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)
You could argue that the movie can feel like a series of sketched-together set pieces, but what set pieces! That includes the tale of the Trojan horse, a fleeting mention in the poem but here a centerpiece. You can tell that Nolan, who nearly made “Troy” more than two decades ago, has had the sequence — beginning with the Trojan horse sunk in the sand and leading to the burning of Troy — on his mind for years.
Each stop on Odysseus’ journey gives Nolan a mythic playground to explore imagery that verges on the stuff of horror. I was most intoxicated by “The Odyssey” in its most surreal moments: the sight of a giant hand emerging out of the shadows, the meeting with the “shades” of Odysseus’ dead army, risen from the black soil of Hades.
“A time of apparent magic” is how the movie is introduced. Nolan has wisely opted to keep the gods sidelined. Their powers are real, but with the exception of Zendaya’s Athena, who appears like a confidant to Odysseus, the gods, themselves, remain off-screen.
That choice draws Nolan’s “Odyssey,” and its themes of sacrifice, fidelity and honor, closer to reality. And it makes Nolan’s decision to cast his film widely all the more essential. This is a story, passed down for centuries by singers and storytellers, that belongs to all of humankind. Casting the movie with a wide spectrum of actors, including Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, is not only fair game for a purely mythic tale but it gives the movie a present-day vitality. Seeing actors like Elliot Page (indelible as a fallen soldier), John Leguizamo (as the loyal servant Eumaeus) and Damon in this ancient context is a very big reason to see “The Odyssey,” and why Homer’s told and retold tale is worth revisiting, at all. If today has no role, what’s the point? They didn’t have cameras in 700 B.C., either.
This image released by Universal Pictures shows a scene from “The Odyssey.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)
Nolan’s “Odyssey” is nearly three hours long but never slow going. And it’s the friction between past and present that propels the movie as much as Odysseus’ wayward path. Gender roles are examined even while traditional masculinity is upheld. The ending of the poem, a tricky thing since it features mass murder, is given a more palatable action-movie melee. But the essence of “The Odyssey” is here, and Odysseus’ quest to live down his mistakes and uphold his convictions feels vibrant again. Nolan, you might say, is at home.
“The Odyssey,” a Universal Pictures release in theaters Thursday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for violence and some language. Running time: 172 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
-
Politics2 minutes ago
Fate of Blanche’s Nomination Could Rest on One Republican Senator
-
Lifestyle38 minutes agoTrump relished in being compared to dictators like Hitler and Stalin, journalist says
-
Technology50 minutes agoSkullcandy’s bass-boosting Crusher headphones now come with Bose’s ANC
-
World56 minutes agoWATCH: Russian soldier thrown through air as Soviet-era helicopter gun spins out of control
-
Politics1 hour agoLindsey Graham’s final act reverberates in Senate as sister is urged to “keep pedaling”
-
Health1 hour agoIs lettuce still safe to eat amid Taco Bell illness probe? Doctors answer
-
Sports1 hour agoMarcello Hernández roasts Jake Paul, Tiger Woods and Bill Belichick in ESPYS monologue
-
Technology1 hour agoYou paid for it. So why is your device showing ads?
