A display reveals the ceremony by which Norma Lucia Pina prepares to take the oath as president of the Supreme Courtroom of Justice whereas talking on a tv display within the press room of the Supreme Courtroom constructing in Mexico Metropolis, Mexico January 2, 2023.
| Photograph Credit score: Reuters
Mexico’s Supreme Courtroom elected the primary feminine chief justice in its historical past Monday, January 2, 2023.
Justice Norma Lucía Piña was sworn in for her four-year time period on the head of the 11-member court docket, pledging to keep up the independence of the nation’s highest court docket.
“Judicial independence is indispensable in resolving conflicts between the branches of presidency,” Ms. Piña stated Monday in laying out her plans. “My essential proposal is to work to construct majorities, leaving apart my private imaginative and prescient.”
As Chief Justice, Ms Piña may even head the whole judicial department. She isn’t thought of an ally of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and opposition events welcomed her election.
The 6-5 vote by her fellow Ministers on January 2, 2023, got here regardless of stress by López Obrador on the Ministers.
Mr. Obrador had backed one other feminine justice, Yasmín Esquivel, for the highest submit. However indications emerged just lately that Justice Esquivel could have plagiarised a tutorial paper to get her bachelor’s diploma within the late Nineteen Eighties.
The general public college the place she received that diploma continues to be learning the case; her thesis, introduced in 1987, was equivalent to 1 introduced a yr earlier. Esquivel claimed the sooner thesis copied her later work.
The President has pushed a variety of controversial legal guidelines by Congress, solely to see them blocked by the courts, and getting an ally elected as Chief Justice was seen as key for Mr. Obrador.
On Monday, he claimed “the judicial department has been kidnapped … has been eclipsed by cash, by financial energy.” Nonetheless, Sen. Olga Cordero, Mr. Obrador’s former Inside Secretary, welcomed Piña’s election.
“Now’s the time of human rights, the time for ladies,” Cordero wrote in her social media accounts.