Transparency in the judicial sector
Until very recently, Mexican law didn’t require overt transparency in the judicial system. The 2015 General Transparency Law had a loophole that enabled the judiciary system to remain opaque. The law established that judges only needed to publish sentences that they deemed to be of “public interest”. This ambiguous and subjective term left a grey area in what was considered to be of public interest or not.
Many judges used the undefined term as an excuse to avoid publishing sentences. Indeed, 19 tribunals — half of the total in Mexico — have not made their sentences public for years. As a result, there is no way to verify whether there have been improvements in access to justice for underserved groups, particularly women. Without public sentences there is no evidence to gauge whether judges are making decisions aligned with the law. So the Lo Justo es Que Sepas coalition set out to make judicial sentences more public.
