Judicial Elections a Setback for Justice in Mexico, Judges Say

The balance of power was eliminated following a reform of the judicial branch and the first elections held on June 1.

The last person to vote casts their ballot at a polling station in Mexico City on June 1, 2025. Carl de Souza/AFP via Getty Images

The judicial elections recently held in Mexico constitute a setback in the administration of justice in Mexico, according to several judges and magistrates.

“In all democracies, in all modern states, there is always a balance of power. There is always a system of checks and balances, and when the government, the executive branch, issues an authoritarian act, the judiciary must stop it,” Guanajuato District Judge Ulises Fuentes Rodriguez told The Epoch Times.

The judicial reform means aspiring judges and magistrates are no longer required to have the necessary experience and it weakens judicial independence, according to several Mexican judges and magistrates with more than 20 years of experience.

After the reform was approved by the Mexican Congress last year, Mexican citizens were asked on June 1 for the first time to vote for the 881 federal judges, magistrates, and judicial officials from 19 states, who had been preselected in February through a lottery, something unprecedented in the country.

The judicial reform was proposed in February 2024 by then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and subsequently approved in Congress in September by a legislative majority of the left-wing Morena political party, or National Regeneration Movement, founded in 2014 by López Obrador, just days before the end of his presidential term.

“In this final stretch, the truth is, the first reading that was done, that it was like a package of constitutional and legal reforms, more of a token nature for electoral purposes,” attorney Claudia Aguilar Barroso, a constitutional law specialist, told The Epoch Times.

The judicial reform proposed by the former president changed the method of electing judges and magistrates to the Judiciary, which was based on professional experience and experience evaluation, to one based on a popular vote.

Judge Ulises Fuentes, a 26-year veteran of the federal judiciary, said the majority of lawyers who were recently elected to the judiciary do not have the experience required to serve.

“I had to take the exam four times and passed the fifth time. 1,800 lawyers from across the country participated in that competition, and only 18 of us passed the three-stage exam and were elected to the position of federal judge,” he said.

Gerardo De la Concha, writer and strategic adviser for government agencies, agreed that “being a judge requires knowledge, a degree.”

“Not just anyone can be a judge, much less in a legal system as complicated as Mexico’s. ... The Mexican legal system is written, not oral law. So, if you don’t study hard, you won’t be able to apply it properly,” he said.

Before the constitutional reform, judges and magistrates had to have a law degree, five to 10 years of experience, be at least 30 years old for judges (or 35 for magistrates), and pass a complex exam that consisted of three stages: a knowledge exam, a practical exam on resolving a real case and issuing a ruling, and an oral exam before a jury.

Now, with the judicial reform, to be a judge, magistrate, or court minister, a grade point average of 8 on the law degree (the maximum is 10), five letters of recommendation from neighbors, and a statement of reasons are required.

“None of the justices who just won the elections have any judicial experience or career, and all of them are Morena supporters,” Fuentes said.

For example, the nine members of the Supreme Court and the five members of the newly created Disciplinary Tribunal who won their elections are close to Morena or worked for Obrador.

José Manuel de Alba, a circuit magistrate in Jalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, who served for 20 years, said that “judges should not be elected.”

“Judges are not representatives of the people. The executive and legislative branches are precisely the representatives of the population. They make the laws. They execute them, and we are there to protect them,” he told The Epoch Times.

He added that “the rule of law is being destroyed in Mexico.”

A Lawsuit in Progress

Fuentes said that on May 22, a group of more than 400 Mexican judges and magistrates filed a complaint against the Mexican government before the United Nations Human Rights Council, accusing it of deprofessionalizing the justice system in the country. Through this complaint, he said, they seek to reverse the reform and invalidate the elections.

At the international level, the United Nations and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expressed concerns about the reform’s compatibility with international standards of judicial independence in a preliminary report by the Organization of American States (OAS) electoral observation mission published on June 6.

Following the elections, the regulatory body, the National Electoral Institute, published the results of the judicial elections, with a voter turnout of 13.01 percent, which the OAS noted as concerning due to low participation.

The UN Special Rapporteur also warned in the same report that popular elections could politicize the judiciary, subordinating technical decisions to electoral interests.