On September 15, 2017, the Decree amending and adding Articles 16, 17 and 73 of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States, in matters of Cotidian Justice, was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation. In essence, this constitutional reform consisted of: (i) to establish the obligation of the authorities to resolve the disputes submitted for their consideration, preventing procedural formalities from preventing the issuance of a substantive judgment (Articles 16 and 17), and (ii) to establish the competence of the Congress of the Union to issue a single legislation on civil and family procedural matters (Article 73).
The transitory articles of said constitutional reform provide that the Congress of the Union must issue said law within a maximum term of one hundred and eighty days from the day following the day on which said decree was published, and that within the same term, the amendments to the general, federal and local laws that are necessary to incorporate the amendments to articles 16 and 17 of the Constitution must be made.
Despite the fact that the 180-day term provided for in the decree has passed, neither the Congress of the Union nor the local legislatures have complied with the constitutional mandate.
The omission in which the federal and local legislative bodies of the Mexican State have incurred, violates the fundamental right of individuals to effective judicial protection, in addition to unjustifiably allowing the judicial backlog currently existing in the courts to continue, thus perpetuating the sense of impunity perceived in most of the national territory.
The failure to comply with the constitutional reform is serious if we consider that according to information provided by the National Institute of Geography and Statistics (INEGI), more than two thirds of judicial litigation is precisely of a family and civil nature.
