Iván Evair Saldaña
La Jornada Newspaper
Thursday, December 5, 2024, p. 8
The second chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) yesterday registered its first tie of two votes against two, as a result of that body being left with four members due to the fact that Minister Luis María Aguilar Morales retired on last November 30th.
This scenario is expected to be repetitive – which will delay the resolution of issues – for almost the entire following year, because there will not be an appointment to take the place of Aguilar Morales, because the judicial reform, enacted on September 15, contemplates only the renewal of the plenary session until September 1, 2025, with nine ministers elected by popular vote.
The tie in the Court occurred when discussing a project by Minister Yasmín Esquivel Mossa that protects an individual against the decree of reforms to the Mining and Water laws, promoted by the then president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and promulgated on May 8 of 2023, which prohibited the granting of concessions in protected natural areas or where the population is put at risk, as well as in areas without availability of the liquid.
Esquivel voted against his project along with Lenia Batres Guadarrama, and in favor, Javier Laynez Potisek and Alberto Pérez Dayán.
The complainant challenged that her application for a mining concession, which she submitted on December 8, 2020, was dismissed without further processing and automatically when the reform came into force in 2023, since the fifth transitional article of the same orders that Applications in process for new exploration licenses will be discarded without further processing, in accordance with the provisions of this decree.
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