By Laurence Pantin

This Sunday, citizens will go to the polls to elect 2,661 judicial positions from among 7,784 candidates at the federal level and in 19 states.

While some countries do elect certain categories of judges through popular vote, it is important to highlight that in several respects, this judicial election is unprecedented. First, Mexico is the only country in the world that will elect judges at all levels—trial courts, appellate courts, and the Supreme Court—at both the federal and state levels. However, to make this election possible, Mexico will also become the only country in the world to remove all its judges within a span of two years.

This change is accompanied by the creation of a new Judicial Disciplinary Tribunal—with broad powers to investigate and, if necessary, sanction judicial personnel, particularly judges—which carries serious risks for judicial independence.

It is important to remember that judicial independence is not a privilege of judges, but a guarantee for those with a case in court that the person deciding it will do so based on facts and the law—not political, economic, or any other type of pressure.

For this reason, the School of Social Sciences and Government at Tec has promoted the creation of a Justice Observatory, under the coordination of retired Justice José Ramón Cossío and the author of this article.

The purpose of this Observatory is to promote regulatory and institutional reforms that enhance the quality, effectiveness, and independence of the judiciary, by offering evidence-based recommendations.

In the context of the judicial reform approved in September of last year, the Observatory will specifically focus on analyzing the impact of this reform through three main lenses.

First, we have the organizational structure axis, through which we have begun to analyze certain aspects of the judicial elections. For example, we organized two workshops where we invited experts from Bolivia to share their experience monitoring electoral processes in that country, as well as electoral law experts to explain the rules of this election and how they differ from general election rules.

Once the elections conclude, we will compare the profile of judges before and after the reform. We aim to find out whether the reform achieved its goal of renewing the judiciary with individuals from more diverse backgrounds. We will also seek to measure the reform’s impact on average age, years of experience, and career trajectory of judges as a whole.

In the coming months, it is likely that the new judges will go through a steep learning curve, which could affect their efficiency and result in backlogs in their respective courts and tribunals. This, in turn, may affect litigants, who might have to wait longer for their cases to be resolved. Therefore, we will also analyze the reform’s impact on the time it takes to resolve judicial cases.

The second axis of the Observatory focuses on the jurisdictional aspect. Professor Roberto Lara Chagoyán has been working on establishing a baseline of existing jurisprudence in eight areas: guarantees of legal security, efficient public management, justiciability of Economic, Social, Cultural, and Environmental Rights, public liberties, family law, regulation of commercial relationships, labor rights, and jurisdictional conflicts. Once the new judges take office and begin issuing rulings and setting new precedents, we will compare the scope of our rights before and after the reform.

Finally, the third axis will focus on the disciplinary aspect. We will analyze the functioning of the new Disciplinary Tribunal and its criteria for sanctioning judicial staff and, when applicable, judges. Specifically, we will look for indications of whether the Tribunal’s decisions are based on objective criteria or, conversely, reveal signs of arbitrary rulings. We will also attempt to assess the impact of these decisions on judicial independence.

In light of the possibility that this judicial reform could represent a setback for our rule of law, we cannot remain idle. As academics, we have the responsibility to document the potential impacts of this reform and propose recommendations to improve the justice system in our country.

Laurence Pantin is co-coordinator of the Justice Observatory at the School of Social Sciences and Government of Tecnológico de Monterrey. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences with a specialization in Political Science from FLACSO, a Master’s in Journalism from New York University (NYU), and a BA in Communications from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). Her research areas include judicial independence, open justice, digital justice, and state judicial branches.