Mexico City Reforms its Juvenile Justice System

The Mexico City Assembly passed a new Juvenile Justice Law (Ley de Justicia para Adolescentes) last week. The new law creates an integrated adversarial system for all crimes. This will replace the existing hybrid system where "non-grave" crimes were tried in a semi-adversarial system with oral trials but "grave" crimes were tried under Mexico's traditional inquisitorial system. The differences between the adversarial system and inquisitorial system are significant. The inquisitorial system in Mexico is an off-shoot of a Spanish-style written system, where prosecutors file written briefs and written evidence, the defense gives written responses and the judge makes written rulings. Each step of the process is painful and drawn-out. The adversarial system uses oral hearings where lawyers state their cases orally, the judge responds and provides a ruling at the end of the hearing.


The adversarial system is designed to safeguard the rights of both defendants and the victims, is more transparent and more efficient. While Mexico City is not the first juvenile justice system in Mexico to make this transition, its move is significant for two reasons. First, Mexico City has the largest juvenile justice system in the country. If reform can work here it can work anywhere. Second, Mexico City's adult system, also the largest in Mexico, has not made the transition to an adversarial system. Mexico City's juvenile system can therefore become a test-case and model for the adult system when it finally makes the transition (required by 2016). Other Mexican states have had difficulty making the transition.

The new law takes effect starting in 2015. Making the next seven months a critical time to prepare the new system. The court, prosecutor's office and public defender's office will have to write new internal regulations. Lawyers and judges will need training and guidance on the new system. There will be a lot of work to do.

Plus this provides a tremendous opportunity for the Children in Prison Project. Together with the Mexican organization Instituto de Justicia Procesal Penal (Procedural Justice Institute) we have submitted a proposal to the Superior Court of Mexico City to create a new Pretrial Services Unit. With the transition to the adversarial system, this proposal has even more importance. Under the new system, pretrial detention should not be automatic but determined on a case-by-case basis within 1-2 days of arrest. Under the current system children are in prison on average of 25 days before they are granted bail, if they are granted bail at all.

However, the failure to create a Pretrial Services Unit will leave judges no way to effectively and efficiently decide which juveniles should be in pretrial detention. The inertia will be to simply lock up all juveniles in pretrial detention as they do now. Plus, because judges are tasked with supervising release, already overburdened court offices have a disincentive to grant pretrial release.

The Children in Prison Project will be submitting a follow-up report based on our Mexico City report published last year, to the court, encouraging the establishment of a Pretrial Services Unit and further recommendations on how to reduce juvenile pretrial detention.  This is the opening we have been waiting for since our project launched last October.