The Court met yesterday to vote on its position on the Supreme Court workers’ strike, with eight Justices in support and three against.
Following this decision, Justices Yasmín Esquivel, Lenia Batres and Loretta Ortiz warned in a statement that stopping work in the Court is unconstitutional, and their colleagues could be subject to impeachment, since they are committing probable crimes by maintaining their salaries during the suspension. This statement generated a response from the 8 Justices, headed by the head of the Court, Norma Piña.
“We deeply regret the insults, slander and threats contained in the joint statement made public by the minority, directed against the ministers who make up this majority,” the ministers who supported the strike said in a statement.
The episode exposed the irreconcilable division between both blocs and the fracture that will become deeper after the approval last night of the judicial reform of the 4T. The Plenary will meet on Monday, September 9, to assess whether to maintain the strike, which was approved by 89 percent of the Court’s employees in follow-up to the protest of administrative workers, Judges and Magistrates of courts and judicial offices. The group of six Ministers and two Ministers who voted in favor of the strike and who have rejected, in the last two years, reforms to secondary laws that Morena and allies approved without changing the Constitution or with serious procedural violations, reiterated that the suspension of work in the Court, as in the rest of the courts, is not total. The circular approved by the majority, during a meeting in which the dissenting Ministers no longer participated, clarifies that guards will only be maintained to process urgent matters, of which the Supreme Court does not know many, since it is the body of last resort, unlike courts and tribunals. The Plenary has 28 matters on the list, of which minor cases were to be seen due to state laws, some of them valid annually. But the list also includes projects that have been postponed, among them, those that annul laws approved by Morena and its allies on the so-called “Black Friday” of April 2023; the extinction of some trusts ordered by Congress in November 2020, as well as the possible order to not apply pretrial detention in Mexico. The First Chamber, for its part, had one hundred matters on the list for its sessions of September 4 and 11 while the Second had already scheduled some 102 files for the same dates. The strike was promoted by the associations that group the closest collaborators of the Ministers, who are around 350 secretaries of study and account and assistant secretaries. These officials are part of the judicial career, many of them participate in competitions for Judges or Magistrates – who would now be elected by popular vote – and the reform may also imply the reduction of their salaries. Of 1,072 votes cast in the Court, 951 were in favor of the strike, 116 against and there were five abstentions. The total number of voters is equivalent to 29 percent of the 3,647 positions occupied by the Court in 2024. However, many of these employees work in buildings alternate to the central headquarters, houses of legal culture in the 32 states, or are operational or administrative staff who are not affected by the reform.
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