The lower house of Mexico’s Congress passed contentious legislation Wednesday that would launch the most sweeping judicial overhaul of the century by requiring all judges to stand for election.
In a marathon session in which legislators were forced to meet in a gymnasium after protesters blocked the Congress building, the lower chamber approved the constitutional measure 359-135 in a party-line first vote just before the sun rose Wednesday morning. The measure, which requires a two-thirds majority, was passed in a second-round vote later that morning, and is now headed to the Senate, where it is expected to pass by a razor-thin margin.
Mexico’s ruling party says judges in the current court system are corrupt, and wants the country’s entire judicial branch – some 7,000 judges – to stand for election.
Critics say the constitutional changes would deal a severe blow to the independence of the judiciary, and they question how such massive elections could be carried out without having drug cartels and criminals field their own candidates.
Attention now turned to the Senate, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ‘s Morena party is one seat short of the two-thirds majority, but might be able to pick off an opposition senator. The Centro Pro human rights groups called on the Senate to kill the measure, saying it “affects the life of democracy, endangers human rights and violate Mexico’s international obligations.”
López Obrador said those who opposed it “have no moral standing, because everyone knows, the majority of Mexicans know, that corruption is rampant in the judiciary.”
The president has long railed against courts that blocked some of his building projects and policy measures because they ran afoul of constitutional and legal norms. López Obrador has vowed for months to rush through a raft of measures like the judicial overhaul – as well as a proposal to eliminate almost all independent oversight and regulatory agencies.
The vote is expected to be extremely tight in the Senate, though the president’s party looks poised to win over the single vote it lacks there. If passed by the Senate, the constitutional proposal would be sent to Mexico’s 32 state congresses where it must be approved by most of them. López Obrador’s party controls a majority of the states.
Critics say the measure will devastate Mexico’s system of checks and balances.
“We should inaugurate a wall of shame that says: ‘Today begins the fall of our Republic.’ And it should have the date and all the faces of the Morena congressmen,” Paulina Rubio Fernández, a congresswoman from the conservative opposition National Action Party, shouted before the vote.
Alejandro Moreno, the head of another opposition party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, vowed Wednesday to have party members vote against the proposal in the Senate, as they did in the lower house.
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