Opening the Doors
In 2014, forty-three Mexican students disappeared from a rural teachers' college. Their families' pleas for answers have fallen on deaf ears. Since then, official numbers report more than 116,000 people missing. When one of these students’ fathers, José Ugalde Mejía, joined a table of judges, lawyers, police officers, researchers, and advocates at the Encuentro Nacional para una Agenda de Seguridad y Justicia to discuss ways to fix Mexico's judicial system, he declared: "In all of the years I've been calling out searching for my son, this is the first time I've felt like someone was listening to me."
Image of participants at a table during the first forum held in Querétaro (2024)
Mexican Supreme Court Chief Justice Norma Lucía Piña Hernández asked GovLab Fellow Dino Cantu to organize 14 such forums across 31 regions in Mexico over the course of 15 weeks from March to July 2024. They expect over 3,500 participants in this first-ever set of innovation exercises for the Mexican legal system. The goal of the brainstorming sessions is to surface the best ideas for how to fix some of the worst problems in the Mexican judicial system.
Solving Problems Together
"The judicial branch doesn't have a monopoly on justice," said Dino. "When you think about justice, there are so many ways in which it can impact a person's everyday life. Unfortunately for most people, their only interaction with the justice system is a negative one at the tail end, when sentences are being passed."
As a result, most Mexican citizens do not trust their justice system. Despite myriad reform efforts, only 58.3% of Mexicans consider the judiciary effective and that number has remained stagnant for several years. Additionally, only 55.5% perceive local police to be effective, and only 37.9% of Mexicans report having much or some trust in the government, while that number is a low 33.1% in the case of the judiciary. Compounding the problem, Mexico has 4.4 judges per 100,000 people, half the global average, leading to long wait times.
Map of Mexico separated by regions participating in the Encuentro Nacional
During these convenings, no one lectures to the 100-150 participants. Instead, a dozen participants from community organizations, academia, nonprofits, the public sector, and everyday citizens sit side-by-side at round tables and brainstorm together.
The Issues
There are four overarching topics of discussion with sub-topics under each (see list below). Participants choose which topic they want to tackle and sit at the table for that topic. This is important, emphasized Dino, so that the public is setting the agenda rather than following the government’s directive. For any given convening only some topics are discussed depending on people's preferences.
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Topic 1: Access to legal services
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Working tables:
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1. Understanding people’s rights
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2. Lawyers and legal services that facilitate access to justice
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3. Legal services for priority groups
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Topic 2: Security and justice
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Working tables:
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1. Public safety and the protection of rights
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2. Victim care
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3. Criminal investigation
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Topic 3: National justice delivery system
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Working tables:
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1. Access to justice
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2. Judicial career
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3. Justice and technology
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Topic 4: Justice and accountability
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Working tables:
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1. Judicial independence
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2. Judicial discipline
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3. Quality in justice
These topics address the main issues individuals face when interacting with the judicial and public security systems. The first topic is understanding legal redress. A person needs to be able to understand a particular grievance as a legal issue so that they may be able to use the legal system for redress. Once a person realizes that a grievance may be remedied by the legal system, they need access to legal services to prepare a claim or assist in producing a remedy. Legal services not only involve lawyers, but many other professional and government services that provide assistance to individuals, such as social workers, paralegals, and even health care professionals.
As one of many examples that emerged during these gatherings, the Mexican legal system has not always been able to assist individuals in addressing their legal needs. Whether because of a lack of knowledge of their legal rights or the difficulty in accessing legal professionals, in Mexico there is a significant number of legal needs that are not being processed by the legal system. Also, certain groups based on income level, race, and gender experience special legal needs.
The second broad topic focuses on security and criminal justice. While strictly speaking these are also legal needs, in these meetings they are treated separately because of the particularly complicated situation that the country is facing. This topic allows participants to explore which rights are involved in security and criminal justice and how they are addressed by state agents as well as lawyers. This topic also focuses on the legal needs of victims and how they are addressed. Thirdly, it addresses criminal investigations. This includes police operations, prosecutors, and judges.
The third and fourth topics focus on the judiciary, the center of the justice system. The third topic gives participants the opportunity to analyze issues connected to access to justice. Here, access to justice is understood as the way people may present claims before the judiciary.
Lastly, the fourth topic covers judicial professionalization, technology and justice, judicial independence, and judicial accountability. While significant efforts have been made in recent decades to improve the effectiveness in which the judicial system in Mexico is able to address legal needs, many people still consider that the judiciary is overall ineffective on this point. Therefore, no discussion on how to improve the justice system would be complete without the opportunity to discuss how the judiciary can more effectively address the legal needs of Mexican citizens.
The roundtable moderators are trained using The GovLab’s problem definition methodology, which involves helping participants push beyond intractable challenges to identify specific, actionable root causes. Students with backgrounds in writing and journalism serve as transcribers.
What They Will Produce
The first outcome is to connect the participants, who now have a deep knowledge of the issues and an interest in tackling them. The hope is that by forging a community of practice, the conversations can continue past roundtable discussions.
After forums are complete, discussion notes (with names redacted) will be published as open data. The team will leverage generative AI to extract both the stories that participants shared about their own experiences with the system and the ideas they propose in an effort to surface usable ideas for implementation by the participating government entities.
“Each branch of government, each department or subcommittee, they each have one small part of the solution to a broader, more complex problem,” says Dino. “These sweeping public problems cannot be solved by different groups working independently of one another; they can only be solved collaboratively, collectively, with people sharing ideas, lessons, insights.”
One can only spend so much time shouting into the void before citizens begin to feel disheartened and isolated. The dialogues offer a way for people like José Ugalde Mejía, who feels that he has spent years pleading with countless government agencies, to be heard and help find his son. With research suggesting that empathy has steadily declined, the opportunity to talk to one’s neighbors and senior government officials about issues of importance creates the potential to restore trust in one another and in institutions.
“I think it has been an exceptional success to be able to carry out these spaces where the voices of people in search of truth and justice are heard,” said José. “[The Encuentro Nacional] listened to us, they asked us questions. To help us be able to express how we feel — believe me — I applaud them because opening this space for the thousands of mothers, fathers, and other family members like me is a historic achievement.” You can listen to his full testimony (in Spanish) along with others here.
The Encuentro Nacional para una Agenda de Seguridad y Justicia is an attempt to preserve and promote empathy between the Mexican people and their government. At The GovLab, we are eagerly awaiting the results of the forums and anticipating exciting updates and results from Dino and the Encuentro Nacional team.
To learn more about the initiative, visit https://www.scjn.gob.mx/encuentro. To see pictures and testimonials from the first convening, visit this page.
Looking for the Missing People of Mexico. Photographs and text by Manuel Bayo Gisbert. May 8, 2024. Opinion. The New York Times. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/08/opinion/mexico-kidnapping-disappearance-survival.html?searchResultPosition=1
Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción de Seguridad Pública, 2023. INEGI. Source: https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/programas/envipe/2023/doc/envipe2023_8_autoridades_seguridad_publica.pdf
Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción de Seguridad Pública, 2023. INEGI. Source: https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/programas/envipe/2023/doc/envipe2023_8_autoridades_seguridad_publica.pdf
Latinobarómetro, 2023. Source: https://www.latinobarometro.org/latOnline.jsp
Índice de Paz México, 2024. Instituto para la Economía y la Paz. Source: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5eaa390ddf0dcb548e9dd5da/t/6642ff43b5cc3f2cc286e87b/1715666787084/MPI-ESP-2024-web-130524.pdf
