• CONGRESS: Mexico’s Lower House of Congress amended the country’s transparency laws mandating the Judiciary Branch -both at the federal and at the state level- to publish all judicial sentences in their entirety; the Senate took similar action earlier this week.
• CLOSING A GAP: “This situation created a gap that was used by some judicial branches in the States to not make their work transparent”, said José Luis Montalvo Luna, a congressman from the Labor Party who chairs the anti-corruption and transparency committee in the Lower House.
• OPACITY: A study published in 2015 by EQUIS (one of six civil society organizations pushing for the changes) none of the judiciary branches in the 32 States complied with making public judicial sentences following the principles of maximum publicity, accessibility, completeness and timeliness.
• LAGGING BEHIND: Mexico’s criminal and civil justice systems lag behind many countries in its similar income group with the most recent World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index of 126 countries ranking Mexico at place 115 on criminal justice and at place 113 on civil justice.
