The election of judges will be financed with PJF trusts

Andrea Becerril, Fabiola Martinez and Fernando Camacho

The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday, August 18, 2024, p. 3

The decision to modify the presidential initiative to extend the current five members of the upper chamber of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Branch of the Federation (TEPJF) until 2027 is due to the fact that it is the body responsible for resolving the challenges presented in the extraordinary election of judges, magistrates and ministers, which will be held in June 2025, which is proposed to be financed with resources from the trusts of the Judicial Branch of the Federation (PJF), currently in litigation.

The draft opinion on the reform insists that members of the TEPJF cannot be replaced at this time.

However, the decision will allow the five judges, several of them highly questioned, who have been involved in fights for the presidency of that court, to remain in office for three more years, despite the fact that they have been there since 2016, and even Reyes Rodríguez and Felipe Fuentes will conclude their terms in office next October.

Meanwhile, the president of the TEPJF, Mónica Soto; Janine Otálora and Felipe de la Mata would conclude their terms in October 2025, as part of a staggered replacement that has been interrupted until now, since two vacancies have persisted since October of last year.

Soto became president of the court in January of this year, after managing to remove Reyes Rodríguez – with the support of two of his colleagues – and the same happened to Otálora, who was sheltered by her colleagues to be president (from October 2016 to January 2019), and then forced to resign, which is a common practice and conflict in the upper chamber for the past five years.

For this reason, the draft resolution being analyzed in the Chamber of Deputies established that in order to avoid such conflicts, the presidencies of the TEPJF and the Supreme Court will rotate every two years, and will be occupied by the judges who receive the most votes at the polls.

Asked about the possibility of continuing for three more years as an electoral magistrate, Reyes Rodríguez commented that his appointment ends on October 31, and Any other date contemplated in a preliminary report is a legislative working hypothesis on which it is not pertinent to comment until it is approved by the Congress of the Union..

In the draft opinion of the Constitutional Points Commission of San Lázaro, chaired by the Morena member Juan Ramiro Robledo, it is specified that in the extraordinary process of 2025 the two missing magistrates of the upper chamber will be elected, as well as the 15 of the regional ones, for periods of six years.

Most of the changes made to the judicial reform proposed by López Obrador are contained in 11 transitional articles.

Regarding the financing of the extraordinary elections of June 2025 and 2027, another transitional provision specifies that it will be paid with the 24 billion pesos of the 14 PJF trusts, which were liquidated by Congress and should have been returned to the Treasury of the Federation, but the opposition filed an appeal and the Court suspended the effects of that reform.

Despite this, It is considered financially viable and appropriate to provide that the funds necessary for the implementation of the reform come from the resources of the trusts, guaranteeing respect for the labor rights of the workers of the Judicial Branch..

The election of judges, magistrates and ministers will be in charge of the National Electoral Institute (INE), and since you will be faced with assumptions or situations that are not clearly specified in the law and that it is a process notable for its magnitude, complexity and noveltyof tools and powers that allow you to make immediate operational decisions within a framework of legality and certainty.

In that sense, A third paragraph was added to the eighth transitory article which establishes that the INE must apply the laws that are issued on the occasion of this reform, Therefore, the provisions of Article 105 of the Constitution will not apply, which provides that the electoral rules must be promulgated and published at least 90 days before the process to be applied begins..