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| Justice Valls Hernández Photo: Javier Garcia |
Milenio: Rubén Mosso
Translated by Noah BurtonTwo justices of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, Sergio Valls Hernández and Arturo Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea, criticized the lack of action by the three branches of government in enacting the 2008 constitutional reform of the country’s justice system.
“We are going on five years [since the reforms were put in motion] and, I have to say, almost nothing – very little has been done,” declared Justice Valls Hernández.Alluding to the lawmakers who drove the constitutional reform in 2008, he said that they just “unleashed it” and that “there was no follow-up.”
“There seems to be a bit of light at the end of the tunnel, now that we have a [draft of the] procedural code which will, of course, be the starting point for a whole series of laws that Congress will need to produce,”Justice Valls Hernández said this while participating in the fifth National Forum on Security and Justice, organized by the National Network in favor of Oral Trials.
Meanwhile, Zaldívar Lelo de Larrea asserted that the current criminal justice system is broken; it doesn’t defend the human rights of defendants or the rights of victims, and it fails badly in combating delinquent behavior.
He spoke of a paradoxical system, with prisons full of the innocent, and with vulnerable groups that lack access to proper legal defense, such as indigenous groups. Lelo de Larrea expressed a need for substantial change in Mexico, change that defends human rights in the country.
María de los Ángeles Fromow, Technical Secretary of the Coordinating Council for Judicial Reform, expressed confidence that the draft of the Code of Criminal Proceedings will be approved and will lead to an extraordinary period of change in the justice system in Mexico. Spanish original