Mexico’s Top Court Dismisses Proposal to Invalidate Contentious Judicial Overhaul

The move spares the country’s new president from having to choose between recognizing a court decision to strike down the overhaul or aligning with her party’s leaders and ignoring it.

Mexico’s Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed a proposal that would have struck down core parts of a recent overhaul of the country’s courts system, effectively ending any contest against a redesign of the judiciary in which nearly all judges must now be elected instead of appointed.

The dismissal hands a victory to the governing Morena party, which quickly won legislative approval in September for one of the most drastic redesigns of the judiciary in any major country in recent years.

The decision also spares the country’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, the significant dilemma of choosing between recognizing a court decision to strike down the overhaul or siding with other of her party’s leaders, who have said they would ignore such a ruling.

The court’s decision to dismiss the proposal was unanimous after failing to secure the eight votes needed to pass it.

Juan Luis González Alcántara, a justice on the Supreme Court, had put forward the proposal to the court for a last-ditch compromise in a bid, in his view, to preserve a degree of judicial independence and reduce political tensions. He had suggested the election of Supreme Court justices and other judges on high courts, while allowing thousands of other federal and local judges, who are appointed based on years of training, to remain in their jobs.

“I’m extending a hand, opening up the possibility for negotiation, for reflection, an invitation to weigh things carefully,” Justice González Alcántara told The New York Times last week.

The high court’s ruling also puts an abrupt — and, to some Mexicans, unexpected — end to political tensions that have escalated in recent months.

“The silver bullet to kill the overhaul was properly this opportunity,” said Juan Jesús Garza Onofre, a constitutional law researcher. “The court wasn’t up to the task,” he added. “Any chance of resistance is over.”

Ms. Sheinbaum campaigned for office promising to deliver just the kind of overhaul that lawmakers passed — and she won with the largest margin of victory of any president since Mexico transitioned to democracy in 2000. The governing bloc also secured effective supermajorities in both houses of Congress and most state legislatures and governorships.

Congress then pushed the overhaul through as a constitutional amendment just days before the former president’s term ended in September.

For two months, thousands of workers in the federal court system have been on strike to protest the overhaul. There were more than 500 legal challenges to the measure, and several federal judges ruled in favor of suspending its approval and implementation.

In recent weeks, Ms. Sheinbaum and legislators have opted to ignore those rulings.

“A judge is not above the people of Mexico,” Ms. Sheinbaum said at a news conference in October.

When commenting on the news that the Supreme Court was considering a resolution to partly invalidate the judicial overhaul, she called it an inappropriate attempt by the justices to legislate.

Had at least eight Supreme Court justices approved Justice González Alcántara’s proposal, Ms. Sheinbaum would have found herself in a conundrum: She could have either disregarded the ruling, further deepening what legal scholars have called a constitutional crisis in Mexico. Or she could have heeded it, risking her standing with her own party.

To vote in favor of the proposal, “no matter how hard I try to convince myself otherwise,” would be “to respond to a folly, irresponsibly taken to the supreme text, with another equivalent folly,” said Justice Alberto Pérez Dayán.

While nearly no one in Mexico disagrees that the nation’s judiciary is in need of a major revamp, the proposed method — in which the country’s more than 7,000 judges and magistrates would be elected rather than appointed — has raised concerns among legal scholars, investors and international organizations.

Critics worry that electing judges by popular vote would politicize the courts, create a morass of conflicts of interest and erode judicial independence. This has happened before in countries that have carried out similar measures, including the United States.

Proponents instead argue that the move will rid Mexico’s court system of deeply rooted problems, such as corruption and nepotism.

“You cannot negotiate what the people have decided and what is already part of the Constitution,” Ms. Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday.

So far, hundreds of federal judges and magistrates have refused to participate in the election next summer. Eight of the Supreme Court’s 11 justices also said last week that they would step down from their posts rather than run for election.

In October, Congress passed a bill that would prevent any legal challenges to constitutional amendments, like the judicial overhaul, on anything but procedural grounds. The president published it in the government’s official gazette on Thursday night, making it law.

Legal scholars say that could allow lawmakers to reshape the Constitution without any judicial review, even from the Supreme Court.

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