Mexican Supreme Court abdicates responsibilty
From La Jornada
La Corte desecha demanda ciudadana para indagar el proceso
(Court rejects citizen demands to investigate the process)
The plenary session of the Supreme Court of Justice decided yesterday, by eight votes against two, to completely reject citizen applications that it investigate voting violations in the July 2nd elections.
Such demands were based on article 97 of the Constitution, which authorizes the highest court "to conduct an official inquiry into any presented fact or facts that constitute an electoral violation, but only in those cases in which, in its opinion, the legality of the entire electoral process of some of the powers of the Union may be placed in doubt."
Yesterday’s decision was foreseeable, not only because of the well-known submission made to the Executive by the president of the Court, Mariano Azuela Güitrón, but because, in the middle of last month, this same magistrate declared that the constitutional rule referred to was, in his opinion, "totally anachronistic, obsolete" and "had been written by someone’s feet" [by amateurs, dullards.]
At the end of the day, such is the deplorable spectacle offered by the President of the Judicial Power that he can speak of the Magna Carta in such [disdainful] terms, and it is evident, then, that the highest court of the country is ready to entirely wash its hands of the current post-electoral conflict.
Yesterday, most of the ministers of the plenary session alleged that the citizens who presented the applications allegedly lacked the legitimacy to do so. This apparently because the constitutional text outlines that the power of the Supreme Court to investigate election violations depends on the process being executed “officially” [presumably this implies the ridiculous notion that the applications must be made by the government itself, the same government alleged to have committed the fraud!]
One thing is certain, and that is the failure shown last tuesday by the Electoral Court of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), which itself recognized the existence of irregularities and improper (perhaps illegal) conduct by the President of the Republic and by the business community. Regardless, the Supreme Court has decided to wash its hands of the whole business and to abstain from any official intervention in this conflict, an escape by a set of [national] institutions that now constitutes a serious threat for the stability, the governability and the peace of the country.
Thus, the highest court made itself co-responsible, together with the Presidency, the Federal Electoral Institute, the TEPJF, private capital and the House of Representatives, from whose high benches only yesterday the PAN and PRI factions delivered to Felipe Calderón the solemn sash that designates him President Elect of this dead end in the political life of both the nation and the fractured citizenry; this was to be the [judicial] balance of July’s messy and doubtful electoral process. With the SCJN ‘s ruling, the last of the institutional channels was closed by which the confrontation might have channeled itself.
The group in the power now asserts, through every medium that it can, that the citizen movement, articulated through the presidential candidacy of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, wants nothing less than the surrender of Society’s institutions, that these be delivered to AMLO, but more, that the head of the coalition For The Good of All be made the Head of State. Such an argument is one more example of the habitual distortions of official discourse, in which almost all the matters of the national life are distorted and adulterated. What the movement has truly requested, and that request finds echo in ample sectors of the population, is the healthy operation of mechanisms of opposition and correction for the defects in the electoral machinery.
The absurd refusal of the TEPJF to recount the ballets cast on the 2nd of July showed that the opponents were right to protest, and that is now confirmed with punch in the nose they have received from the SCJN. Mexico suffers from institutions that proffer unquestionable failures, institutions that cover each others backs and that constitute, altogether, not a system of counterbalances, but a network of complicities; a system that decreed the nonexistence of at least a third of the citizenship and now tries to pretend nothing has happened.
La Corte desecha demanda ciudadana para indagar el proceso
(Court rejects citizen demands to investigate the process)
The plenary session of the Supreme Court of Justice decided yesterday, by eight votes against two, to completely reject citizen applications that it investigate voting violations in the July 2nd elections.
Such demands were based on article 97 of the Constitution, which authorizes the highest court "to conduct an official inquiry into any presented fact or facts that constitute an electoral violation, but only in those cases in which, in its opinion, the legality of the entire electoral process of some of the powers of the Union may be placed in doubt."
Yesterday’s decision was foreseeable, not only because of the well-known submission made to the Executive by the president of the Court, Mariano Azuela Güitrón, but because, in the middle of last month, this same magistrate declared that the constitutional rule referred to was, in his opinion, "totally anachronistic, obsolete" and "had been written by someone’s feet" [by amateurs, dullards.]
At the end of the day, such is the deplorable spectacle offered by the President of the Judicial Power that he can speak of the Magna Carta in such [disdainful] terms, and it is evident, then, that the highest court of the country is ready to entirely wash its hands of the current post-electoral conflict.
Yesterday, most of the ministers of the plenary session alleged that the citizens who presented the applications allegedly lacked the legitimacy to do so. This apparently because the constitutional text outlines that the power of the Supreme Court to investigate election violations depends on the process being executed “officially” [presumably this implies the ridiculous notion that the applications must be made by the government itself, the same government alleged to have committed the fraud!]
One thing is certain, and that is the failure shown last tuesday by the Electoral Court of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF), which itself recognized the existence of irregularities and improper (perhaps illegal) conduct by the President of the Republic and by the business community. Regardless, the Supreme Court has decided to wash its hands of the whole business and to abstain from any official intervention in this conflict, an escape by a set of [national] institutions that now constitutes a serious threat for the stability, the governability and the peace of the country.
Thus, the highest court made itself co-responsible, together with the Presidency, the Federal Electoral Institute, the TEPJF, private capital and the House of Representatives, from whose high benches only yesterday the PAN and PRI factions delivered to Felipe Calderón the solemn sash that designates him President Elect of this dead end in the political life of both the nation and the fractured citizenry; this was to be the [judicial] balance of July’s messy and doubtful electoral process. With the SCJN ‘s ruling, the last of the institutional channels was closed by which the confrontation might have channeled itself.
The group in the power now asserts, through every medium that it can, that the citizen movement, articulated through the presidential candidacy of Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, wants nothing less than the surrender of Society’s institutions, that these be delivered to AMLO, but more, that the head of the coalition For The Good of All be made the Head of State. Such an argument is one more example of the habitual distortions of official discourse, in which almost all the matters of the national life are distorted and adulterated. What the movement has truly requested, and that request finds echo in ample sectors of the population, is the healthy operation of mechanisms of opposition and correction for the defects in the electoral machinery.
The absurd refusal of the TEPJF to recount the ballets cast on the 2nd of July showed that the opponents were right to protest, and that is now confirmed with punch in the nose they have received from the SCJN. Mexico suffers from institutions that proffer unquestionable failures, institutions that cover each others backs and that constitute, altogether, not a system of counterbalances, but a network of complicities; a system that decreed the nonexistence of at least a third of the citizenship and now tries to pretend nothing has happened.
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