The nine elected members of the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN) took office on September 1st and declared their first ruling ten days later, on September 11th.
In the judicial elections, all the current justices were approved by President Sheinbaum’s MORENA party. So this court is expected to support the MORENA party administration of President Sheinbaum.
However, you can’t always predict a supreme court.
On September 22nd, in a case involving the Mexican Navy, the Mexican Supreme Cout ruled against the position of the Mexican presidency.
This is a leftover case from the previous administration, involving an agency which no longer exists. It started in 2021 and has remained in the system until this ruling.
During the previous AMLO administration, the INAI agency (Instituto Nacional de Transparencia, Acceso a la Información y Protección de Datos Personales -National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Protection of Personal Data) ordered then-President AMLO’s legal counsel to provide official documents about Navy admirals and vice admirals to a private individual.
The AMLO administration refused to provide this information on the grounds that it would endanger Mexican national security.
The case remained in the system despite 1) the transition from the AMLO presidency to the Sheinbaum presidency on October 1st, 2024 and 2) the elimination of INAI in December of 2024.
Finally, on September 22nd, 2025, this Supreme Court ruled that the national security argument was not valid, as this requested information was already public.
As argued by Justice Loretta Ortiz Ahlf, “I do not share the idea that… a risk to national security is perceived in this specific case. In this matter, we must start from an incontrovertible fact: all, all of the information contained in the documents is already in the public domain, and in most cases, it was even published by the same authorities.”
On the other hand, the ruling does not declare that the Navy has to make everything public but such things should be decided on a case by case basis.
The ruling was a unanimous one by 8 justices. One Justice, Maria Estela Ríos Gonzalez, was not allowed to vote on it because in 2022 she was AMLO’s chief legal counsel.
Here is a summary of the ruling from the Mexican Supreme Court’s own website:
“Given that the information requested from the Department of the Navy is already public, the Supreme Court confirmed the resolution of INAI which obliges the Presidency of the Republic to turn over 15 documents signed by the private secretary of the President in 2021 related to the assignments of admirals and vice-admirals , as well as training and instruction. This determines that the reservation of information for reasons of national security should be evaluated case by case.”
“In such a way it has been determined that in this instance, there is no risk to national security. Thus the SCJN guarantees access to public information as a human right which fortifies transparency, accountability and social participation.”
Is this ruling just a fluke? Is it a minor technicality? Or does it portend a level of judicial independence in the future?
We have to wait and see.