Mexico's chosen Supreme Court undergoes crucial trial of autonomous authority

Mexico's first elected Supreme Court will be seated on Monday, with its president being Hugo Aguilar, a lawyer who spent his career defending Indigenous rights. The new court will face a variety of challenging cases, including changes to the mining sector laws, abortion rights, and transgender rights.

The changes to the mining sector laws, passed in 2023, include reducing the maximum length of concessions from 50 to 30 years and punishing speculation by allowing authorities to cancel concessions if no work is done on them within two years. The mining industry, largely foreign, has faced complaints due to ecological damage, speculation, and the continued poverty of communities around the mines.

One of the notable cases the court will likely have to weigh in on is the mandatory pretrial detention issue, which has brought international criticism to Mexico. The Mexican government says that mandatory pretrial detention is a necessary tool to take on criminal activity and to protect judges, while critics argue that it violates the rights of those accused, as four out of every 10 people in Mexican prisons had not been convicted in 2023.

Another contentious issue is the stance on preserving the same line of legal reasoning on issues such as transgender rights. The Supreme Court has previously expanded transgender rights, including ruling that civil registry offices must allow transgender people to change their gender on their birth certificate without going before a judge, and extending this right to children in 2022. However, under Mexico's legal system, the Supreme Court's ruling on expanding transgender rights does not apply to children in all states, with only seven allowing it.

The court's 2023 ruling did not apply state-level criminal penalties related to women's rights to the state statutes, requiring changes state by state. The new Supreme Court will likely have to weigh in on challenges to states that still have abortion on the books as a crime in their penal codes.

The election of the Supreme Court was supposed to be nonpartisan, but there were instances of voting pamphlets identifying candidates linked to the governing party. The new Supreme Court will receive special attention due to its potential influence on the popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's agenda.

Hugo Aguilar, the newly appointed Chief Justice of Mexico's Supreme Court, is known for defending indigenous rights. However, he faced criticisms from human rights organizations about the risk of political influence; he did not publicly address these criticisms directly but took office amid concerns over the judiciary's independence due to the court's composition dominated by allies of President Claudia Sheinbaum's Morena party.

The Supreme Court will have nearly 1,400 pending cases to address. Its decisions on the aforementioned issues will shape the future of Mexico's legal landscape and human rights protections.