Víctor Fuentes / Iris Velázquez / Reform Agency
Saturday, April 22, 2023 | 05:00
Mexico City.— Minister Yasmín Esquivel dealt blows yesterday to a federal court and to the UNAM.
In the morning, a Collegiate Court dismissed Esquivel’s protection with which she had stopped the resolution of the highest house of studies on the alleged plagiarism of her Bachelor’s thesis in 1987.
However, shortly after, a CDMX court ordered UNAM to refrain from continuing the process against the minister.
“This afternoon, minutes after the resolution of the Collegiate Court was made public, the university authorities were notified of precautionary measures imposed by a Civil Court of Mexico City, through which they order our institution to refrain from continuing the university process” said the University.
By two votes to one, the Twenty-First Collegiate Court on Administrative Matters had ruled that Esquivel’s claim was notoriously inadmissible and should not have been admitted in February by federal judge Sandra de Jesús Zúñiga, who granted the suspension that had prevented UNAM from solve the case.
The sentence, once officially notified to the court, would have allowed the University Ethics Committee to continue with the procedure and make it known if Esquivel plagiarized the thesis that the student Édgar Ulises Báez presented in 1986.
In an interview, the UNAM general attorney, Hugo Concha Cantú, expressed his surprise at the type of legal strategies undertaken by Minister Esquivel.
“What surely happened is that the legal team of the minister, well, he had this very measured, in case the resolution of the complaint was adverse to him,” he explained.
“It was a matter of minutes, in what I am hearing on YouTube, on the channel of the Council of the Judiciary, the resolution of the Collegiate, it will have taken me, what can I tell you, probably 10 minutes to start notifying the rest of the authorities here , to the rector, when they let me know here that notifications of a civil trial were coming in,” he said.
