On 15 October, after concluding a 15-day visit to six states of Mexico, including Chiapas, Gabriela Knaul, the Special Rapporteur for the Independence of Teachers and Lawyers presented in a press-conference a preliminary summary of the report she will submit to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2011.
Legal detention, military tribunals, constitutional reforms regarding justice and human rights, judiciary reform, autonomy of public ministries, judge- and lawyer-groups, and the lack of access to justice on the part of vulnerable groups, in addition to structural and organic deficiencies in the justice system, were some of the points included in Knaul’s preliminary comments before the press.
While recognizing the efforts made by Mexico in recent years on the protection of human rights, Knaul cited a listed of aspects in which the country is presently violating its obligations in procuring and imparting justice, the 1994 and 2008 reforms notwithstanding.
Knaul pronounced herself on the disappearance of legal detention, caution with regard to the utilization of protected witnesses, and the need to avoid presenting the accused before the media. Regarding military tribunals, the Special Rapporteur stressed that, following the sentence released by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights regarding the case of the disappeared Rosendo Radilla, the federal executive had committed itself to present a legal initiative to reform the military justice-code. Regardless, she warned, this project would only exclude from the military tribunal the crimes of forced disappearance, torture, and rape, but not those of extrajudicial execution, which would imply an insufficient reform, given that the victims of such abuses or their relatives would continue to go without effective resources for defense–among others, protection.
The expert criticized the lack of autonomy of the Public Ministry vis-a-vis the executive branch, something that “could undermine the confidence and credibility of the authority that is supposed to objectively investigate crimes and exercise penal action before the tribunals in all cases.” She indicated that it is still a rather frequent occurrence that the superior tribunal-judges for justice be named by governors, resulting in the lack of autonomy and objectivity that follows.
In conclusion, she stated that “access to justice continues to comprise [economic] debt for many Mexicans, especially for those who live in situations of poverty, indigenous peoples, and those who reside in rural and remote regions, in addition to women and migrants.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Full intervention of the Special Rapporteur for the Independence of Teachers and Lawyers (press-conference, 15 October 2010)
The judicial system, still subordinate to the executive: UN rapporteur (La Jornada, 15 October 2010)
UN requests protection for MP and judges in Mexico (El Universal, 15 October 2010)
Full report submitted by civil organizations to the rapporteur in Yucatán (12 October 2010)
Report presented by human-rights and academic organizations to the rapporteur in Mexico City (6 October 2010)
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