Judicial Reform: What About Women?

1. Towards the end of the first decade of this century the Federal Judiciary began gradually and effectively training all judicial officers in Gender Perspective. 2.

We are the only government body that is balanced in terms of gender representation among its officials. 3. We have issued the most protective judicial rulings for women in the history of Mexico.



It is not the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) or the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CIDH), but our Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN) that has been the leading force in the protection of women in Mexico. Could the Federal or local Executive Powers say something similar? 4. The fierce and unfounded attack from the Executive and Legislative branches is directed at the first woman to preside over the Supreme Court.

There is a void here, the solidary space of Mexican Feminism remains vacant. Today we need your courage and fight. Norma Piña needs you .

5. I will comment on a ruling where the Gender Perspective yielded satisfactory results. I emphasize that this was the result of years of judicial training, fully supported and implemented through Judicial Independence.

As a Federal Judge I encountered a case involving the formal imprisonment for incest (sexual relations between blood relatives) of a young woman, aged 18, who confessed to having sexual relations with her brother, resulting in the birth of a daughter (Voces Sobre Justicia y Género, SCJN, 2014, Bonifaz Nuño Leticia, pp. 29-44). When she was a child (3 years old) her brother migrated to North America, where he was imprisoned for homicide.

Upon his return, many years later, he was twice her age. While intoxicated, they had sexual relations. The young woman attempted to distance herself from her brother.

He extorted her, verbally and physically assaulted her to stay with him and threatened to tell their parents; he harassed her everywhere. At school he took her phone, called her friends to drive them away. One incident that struck me: on public transportation he hurt her in front of all the passengers.

No one helped her. She went to the Prosecutor’s Office several times to report injuries. Her brother obtained her forgiveness through constant extortion, threatening to tell their parents.

Under threats, she lived with him. Some time later the young woman escaped from her brother and returned with her young daughter to her parents’ home. Her parents protected her.

Her brother had a physical altercation with their father. The young woman went back to the Prosecutor’s Office. This last time, she recounted how it all began with the first intoxicated sexual encounter and confessed to having a daughter with him.

The disgrace: The Prosecutor’s Office charged her with the crime of incest, sought her brother’s arrest, but he fled. She could not escape; with her confession and her daughter’s birth certificate, her imprisonment was formalized. I learned of this ordeal as a judge through an indirect amparo (constitutional relief).

I spent four weeks—Saturdays and Sundays—with the unforgettable Verónica Bojórquez Bojórquez, a tireless, unstoppable judicial secretary. Only cancer could defeat her. We faced an impossible contradiction: a legal solution against irrefutable, ideologically charged evidence of the crime of incest.

In my desperation I devised a “nuclear bomb”: to declare incest unconstitutional. I had many arguments, including a historical study dating back to ancient Rome. We found the key! The first sexual encounter was incestuous but the statute of limitations had expired for that criminal action.

The other incestuous encounters lacked intent. I implemented the Gender Perspective: a young woman sought help from the Prosecutor’s Office several times, ignored, with absurd pardons granted; she was never treated as a victim but as a criminal. A shameful psychological report narrated the young woman’s entire ordeal and concluded that she showed no signs of harm.

The Prosecutor’s Office and the local judge were curing her health. They had formal grounds to deny the obvious: to prosecute a woman victimized through extortion, abduction, rape, pursued by deaf, primitive sexual ideologies. Abandoned and ridiculed by the Prosecutor’s Office, a local judge, and our entire hypocritical society.

The fundamental issue was intent—the will (volition) and understanding (knowledge) of antisocial behavior. The incestuous behavior was the result of fear, a no-way-out situation. A simple student with a daughter and a violent brother.

There was no evidence of intent; under these circumstances, her will was not free. The ruling is extensive. It delves into immense conceptual problems: timing of actions, unity of the crime, negligence, intent, structure of the criminal offense, the Belém do Pará Convention, direct assessment, detail, and consistency of evidence.

.. A false stereotype of our judicial work is to reduce judging to a subjective act of honesty.

Nothing could be further from the truth; constructing rulings involves systematizing, applying, and making sense of millions of norms, treaties, and criteria. Observation and listening go beyond the senses: it is experience, logic, skepticism, constant doubt, openness. Conviction is not a mere opinion; it is a complex of ethics and integrity.

It is to internalize the injustice, to rewrite, to defend, to suffer the law as if it were your own. For many judges, conviction is a formal operation with a result unrelated to them. I agree with this idea in many cases.

Others surpass our limits and must always be studied with a cool head, judged with boiling blood, tempered only by law and logic. 6. The Judicial Reform will be a setback for women’s rights.

A detriment to the invaluable years of training judges with a Gender Perspective, indebted to FLACSO (Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences of the UN). This reform represents a disdain for women by leaving their protection in the hands of individuals without a judicial career or specialized studies. (*) Leonardo González Martínez is a Federal Circuit Judge of the Judicial Career Service.

The texts published in this section are the authors’ sole responsibility, and La Opinión assumes no responsibility for them. Sigue leyendo: • AMLO enviará carta a Joe Biden para denunciar injerencia de EE.UU.

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