After 12 hours of intense debate, interrupted by protesters breaking into the chamber and an attempt by the opposition to take the floor, the Mexican Senate approved in the first minutes of Wednesday the controversial reform to the Judicial Branch that will allow judges to be elected by popular vote starting in 2025.
The reform proposed by the government of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which involves amending the Mexican Constitution, was approved with 86 votes in favor of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and its allies, the Labor Party (PT) and the Green Ecologist Party (PVEM), and 41 against the opposition parties National Action (PAN), Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Citizen Movement (MC).
Following the vote, the senators began a debate on the 60 reserved articles in the reform report, which will be discussed in the early hours of Wednesday.
The government will now seek to replicate the same reform model in the congresses of Mexico’s 32 states.
Intense day
In a session that ended at the former headquarters of the Mexican Senate, in the Historic Center of the capital, heavily guarded by dozens of police officers, Morena senators and allies, together with the opposition, discussed the controversial reform at length and strongly.
The ruling party’s “supermajority” in the Senate was one vote short of the 86 required for a qualified majority, two-thirds of 128 senators, but opposition senator Miguel Ángel Yunes, of the PAN, voted in favor and the reform was able to go ahead.
The long day was interrupted in the afternoon by a group of opponents of the judicial reform who stormed into the Senate with attacks and shoving to try to stop the approval of the text, which forced the legislators to move to the former headquarters of the upper house to continue with their legislative session.
The protesters entered the Senate, where they shouted slogans and disrupted the session, which had to be moved to the former headquarters of that chamber, where they also tried to enter and in the vicinity of which they clashed and skirmished with police.
The group of protesters identified themselves as employees of the judiciary, who have been on strike for almost three weeks in protest against this reform.
In a last-ditch attempt to halt discussion of judicial reform, at around 10:00 p.m. (04:00 GMT on Wednesday) senators from the PRI, PAN and MC tried to take the Senate floor, but Morena and allied legislators prevented them from doing so.
Controversy
The judicial reform, which, in addition to establishing the election of judges by popular vote, creates a disciplinary body to monitor the sentences they hand down, is seen by its detractors as an attempt to undermine judicial independence, Mexican democracy and the separation of powers.
Criticism has come not only from the Mexican opposition, but also from UN bodies, associations such as Human Rights Watch, international legal organisations and the treaty’s North American partners, the United States and Canada.
Once the reform is approved, there will be popular elections and campaigns in the Judiciary starting in 2025, the number of members of the Supreme Court will be reduced from 11 to nine, and a Judicial Disciplinary Tribunal will be created.
The debate in the Mexican Senate began amid complaints from the opposition, which accused the government, including prosecutors, of intimidating legislators to secure the 86 votes, two-thirds of the total 128, needed to amend the Constitution.
President López Obrador was seeking Senate approval of this reform, which was already endorsed by the Chamber of Deputies last Wednesday, before handing over office on October 1 to the president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum.
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