Mexico is poised to amend its constitution this weekend to require all judges to be elected as part of a judicial overhaul championed by the outgoing president but slammed by critics as a blow to the country’s rule of law.
The amendment passed Mexico’s Congress on Wednesday, and by Thursday it already had been ratified by the required majority of the country’s 32 state legislatures. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he would sign and publish the constitutional change on Sunday.
Legal experts and international observers have said the move could endanger Mexico’s democracy by stacking courts with judges loyal to the ruling Morena party, which has a strong grip on both Congress and the presidency after big electoral wins in June.
They would be, but that problem already exists in the current judicial system. Politicians who are racist or misogynistic exist at every level of the government. Private interests have a massive amount of political power through lobbying, and those interests are also overwhelmingly bigoted.
So I don’t really see that as a reason why they shouldn’t be elected. The current system does literally nothing to deal with those biases, and extremely unpopular rulings mean more or less nothing for the judges. Barring widespread protest, they won’t be made to leave office, and widespread protest isn’t exactly functionally distinct from voting them out in this case.